Well now that you have installed WordPress, you should really upgrade to WordPress 2.1 which was released yesterday, and learn how to do an upgrade as well (which is dead simple to do). Lots and lots of good upgraded stuff here, so well worth working on to get your upgrade.

So why do you want to have WordPress installed locally? To learn about how it works mostly. What have I learned:

1. How to backup blogspot blogs onto my local copy of wordpress, which is great. Now I have a backup on my own machine, and I own my own content again.
2. I can fiddle around with blog lay outs and experiment to my heart’s content without having to worry about if some reader comes along and doesn’t like what I have done to it.
3. Learn how all of the SQL, PHP and Apache works together with this application running on top of it.

Now with this upgraded version of WordPress I get to poke around and see if they have a version now that backs up the NEW blogspot blogs locally, and what other benefits I can take advantage of.

Need to start looking at hosting sites and how much they cost and how much I am willing to pay for them, and whether I really need it or not. Let me think about that one for a while.

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To install WordPress locally on my machine was pretty darn simple, after I figure out an important factor in the install. The install relies on PHP to set itself up, well PHP is run by the Web Server, not by your browser, really. I wasted about 1/2 a day on that, until it was pointed out that if I did the following:

1. Untar, or unzip the WordPress archive in your htdocs directory (the directory where the web server looks for content).
2. Run the install program with the following type of incantation:
   http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/wp-install.php

It installs itself very happily (as long as you have done the preliminary set up work on your MySQL database to allow the Web server and PHP to interact correctly). The install instructions (i.e. a readme.htm file) for WordPress are very easy to follow, so just read them, follow them and you should be just fine and dandy.

So now you have a local copy of wordpress to start fooling around with. What can you do with this? Good question.

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So now I had Xampp running on my laptop, and it didn’t seem to be causing too many problems while running, so that was great. I had Apache, MySQL and PHP humming along nicely, so now it was time to start tackling the installation of WordPress on my PC.

To recap, I was doing this for a number of reasons:

1. Learn how this all works together, so I can understand the system. I am a computer geek at heart and even if I end up paying for Web Hosting through another company, that runs WordPress for me, and administers it for me, I still want to know how the whole thing hangs together, because that is what gives me “warm fuzzies“
2. I was going to use this system as my “technical notebook” at work, so that I could enter my notes on line, and then be able to search them better than with my old black lab book.
3. I could use the capabilities of the WordPress to back up my blogs on blogspot to my local PC and thus not be at Blogspot’s mercy if they decided to turn my account off (and I would have lost 3 years worth of writing). This is an important factor as well.

So there you go, three really good reasons to go ahead and attempt to install WordPress on top of Xampp on my laptop. The backup was actually a really nice add on because I am always afraid of losing my writings, which of course one day will be published as a great book (oh that’s funny every time I write it).

So now we are going to try to install WordPress, what do we do next? Well, come back on Monday and we’ll see. –C8j

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So, I was pretty much frustrated trying to piece together Apache, PHP and MySql on my system so that I could then put WordPress up, and then finally allow me to learn how this blogging system works, and was seriously thinking about chucking the whole mess and not worrying about it.

My boss pointed out that he had set up a Private Blog, where he put up all of his work notes, and found that it was very useful for being able to quickly look things up (as opposed to the hard cover lab books that I have used most of my working career). I asked him how he was able to get this all working, without pulling his own hair out, and he pointed me at Xampp .

So what the heck is Xampp? Well some very nice folks decided that trying to get LAMP running, so what they did was package together a relatively easily to install package that includes:

1. The Apache Web server, which is really the “gold card” standard for web servers on the internet (apologies to Microsoft, but this is what I think).
2. PHP to run on top of the Apache server and you really do need this to run WordPress
3. A version of the MySQL database system, which is the engine for the WordPress system (all of your postings are actually stored inside of this beasty).

I was able to get Xampp installed in about 3 hours, after attempting an install without reading their documentation, uninstalling it, and then installing using their documentation (I am an old warhorse when it comes to computers, so I rarely read documentation).

This then meant that I now had a system set up to run on my laptop computer, which only served HTTP requests from my computer. I did this because I was planning on using the system for my personal notes, and didn’t want other folks reading my personal thoughts (and doing this is quite simple really).

So here I sat on the threshold of getting WordPress working, what did I do next? Come back soon and I’ll tell you about how easy it is to get WordPress up and running. –C8j

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So a while back I was trying to learn as much as possible about WordPress, because I do plan one day to move my blogs from blogspot to an independent hosting site and I think WordPress is as good a blogging system to run on as the next. Now WordPress does have it’s own free blog hosting site, so if you are just starting out that might just be the place to start (if you don’t want to use blogspot), however, I already had blogs going, but I did want to learn how all of this stuff was going to work together.

LAMP is the four letter acronym you really do need to learn much more about, it stands for

• L – Linux
• A – Apache Web Server
• M – MySql
• P – PHP

If you are going to do your own hosting from your home, you really need to know all of this and WordPress to get things going. That is a pretty hefty bit of learning to do, so if you want to do this get some books out of the library or buy some before you attempt this.

I wasn’t really ready to try to set all this up in my own home and take care of the servers and admin to the servers, I figured I’d be willing to pay for this, when the time comes (and it hasn’t yet).

I did want to try out WordPress however, so I figured I could try to get Apache Web Server, up and running on my own PC, and learn how it works and then try to put WordPress on top of that. Now I view myself as sophisticated in how computers work and networking and somewhat in how the Internet works, but I was spending WAY too much time trying to get all of this working, and was starting to think about packing the whole mess in.

( continued tomorrow: Then I Found Xampp)

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