In this second post, I’m going to backtrack a little and tell you how I got here. Before being able to make my first post, I had to my blogging environment setup.
Now I had registered my domain some time ago, but had just allowed GoDaddy to park it. For those of you unfamiliar with domain naming conventions (I am hardly an expert), “.me” is technically the top-level domain (TLD) for the country of Montenegro. However, it is a commonly used domain-hack used for registering personal domains.
Having decided on using this site to learn more about WordPress and CMSs in general, I set about finding a hosting service to host the site. I wanted a low cost hosting solution for a couple of reasons. First, I don’t expect this site to garner a lot of traffic, it is more of a personal journal than anything else. But I do hope that some of what post will of use to some out there. And second, I wanted to kind of test the limits of what a simple shared hosting environment can support. I initially selected a relatively small host that offered very low prices, and seemed to have a corporate philosophy with regard to sustainability and customer service that I found attractive. Unfortunately I was never able to get hosting services established with this company. The issue had to do with a credit card payment. I won’t name the company because because the initial fraud alert may have been triggered because I had a VPN that I sometimes use for security enabled at the time. However, since I waited a couple of days trying to get the issue resolved without satisfactory results, I decided to cancel the order and go with HostGator. HostGator has received many favorable reviews but I was hoping to establish a relationship with the smaller company, but setting up hosting with HostGator was very straight forward and I have been happy with their service so far.
While HostGator, along with most other hosting services offer a one-click installation for WordPress, I wanted to do a manual install following along with the training I currently taking through Lynda.com, for its educational value. This process is pretty straight forward. After logging into GoDaddy and pointing my domain to the nameservers provided by HostGator, essentially all I had to do was download the latest WordPress release, then upload all of the WordPress files to the public_html folder on my server using an ftp client (I used FileZilla). Once all of the files were uploaded, I pointed my browser to my domain and WordPress recognized this was a new site and launched a setup wizard. I then followed along with my Lynda.com training to setup the database and primary user. Now here I am on my second post.
From here on I will be continuing on with my WordPress training and updating the site as I go. Because of this, some of the early post may seem somewhat random and vague. While I don’t intend on this being a tutorial creating a blog (or any other kind of website) using WordPress, because there a plenty of other quality sources for that, I will post anything interesting that I discover along the way.
Thanks for following along.