It isn’t necessarily a simple thing to set up a blog on your website. The job isn’t overly difficult but there are a number things you might need to watch out for. For example, there are a number of open source blogging packages but some might not suit you. Click the ‘Read more’ link below for a simple list of things to check and do.
Choosing the right software
kadaitcha.cx’s web-host provides cPanel X, which comes with Fantastico De Luxe, a web application installer. The blogging software includes b2evolution, Nucleus and WordPress, which are all installed through Fantastico. Your web-host may be different but these tips do not depend on you having either cPanel X or Fantastico.
Tip 1: Try the software first.
Install and try the blogging software before you start blogging properly and before you start publishing the link to your blog. You will spend more time in the administrative panels than you will reading your own blog pages so it’s just as important to feel comfortable with the admin interface as it is to feel that your visitors will like the look of your preferred skin.
kadaitcha.cx wasn’t overly impressed with either b2evolution or Nucleus. One of those two packages installed three or four test posts, which then had to be deleted but there was no visible way to set the counter back to 0 so the first proper post had an ID of 4 or 5. Notes weren’t taken so we can’t tell you which one it was that did this. In both cases the user interfaces were clunky and there were odd grammatical errors in at least one of either b2evolution or Nucleus, which was a put-off.
Finally WordPress was installed, but the installation failed with “Error establishing database connection”.
After the failure of WordPress it was uninstalled and Nucleuswas put back, but it was a drudge to use. A quick look around google indicated that WordPress was very popular so it was installed again with the full expectation that there’d have to be some hunting and digging around to find out the cause of the earlier failure and fix it. Oddly, WordPress worked flawlessly the second time it was installed.
Tip 2: Install as many blogging packages as you can, all at once.
If your web-host isn’t stingy with disk space, install all the blogging packages and switch between them when trying to decide what one you will use. Just don’t name all your blogs “Blog”; use “BlogB2″, “BlogNucleus” or “BlogWP”, depending on what packages you have available. Using this approach you can avoiding making the wrong choice later.
When you finally settle on one package, uninstall them all and reinstall your preferred package.
This tip might seem like a lot of work, but you’re far better off to consider trying this approach instead of installing and starting to blog with a package you’ll only end up disliking after a day or so of using it. If you change blogging packages you’ll have to export all your blog pages or same them to your hard disk from within your browser. At best you’ll have to reconfigure all the HTML tags. At worst you’ll have to re-enter all of your blog posts.
Tip 3: Install and try different themes or skins.
Once you’ve settled on a package that suits you, install different themes and try them out. Compare one to another and get a feel for them. You may find a theme you like a lot but may come to despise it after a day’s working with it. This happened to kadaitcha.cx when we tried the ‘non-zero’ theme with Nucleus.
On the need to try different themes, if you intend to have a family-friendly website then check absolutely everything, be-very-ware. kadaitcha.cx installed the nonzero theme on Nucleus and there were links leading to another website. Yours truly innocently clicked on the link to see where it went… WHOA! NO WAY! …it’s amazing how fast you can hit the back button when you need to. On downloading the theme’s source code from the blog on the web-host and checking the source code for the link, it was everywhere. The theme had to be tossed out because it was simply going to be too much work to get rid of it.
There seems to be a bug in WordPress’ theme installer; it complains that it can’t create public_html. WordPress should not be trying to create public_html. Don’t install themes in WordPress 3.0 using the WordPress admin interface. Instead, download the zip package for your preferred theme, unpack the file and use ftp to move the whole theme directory to your WordPress themes directory. If your blog is at the root of your site then the path to the themes directory is [site]\public_html\[blogname]\wp-content\themes.
kadaitcha.cx always uses and recommends open source software wherever possible. If you need an ftp client then you can’t go past FileZilla.
Tip 4: Learn to read a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS).
There’s always going to be something you don’t like about a theme created by someone else. kadaitcha.cx loved the crisp, open and airy style of the new WordPress default theme Twenty Ten, but the theme uses serif fonts and we prefer sans. The text is also grey, not black and kadaitcha.cx web-stats indicate the bulk of our audience is in an age bracket where grey text may not suit the eyes. Certainly it doesn’t suit this writer’s aging eyes, so that had to change.
There were other problems with the theme too. In testing WordPress with the Twenty Ten theme for how it handled the <code> tag, which is used for things like lines of program code, the post editor correctly formatted text tagged with <pre><code>…</code></pre> and applied a scrollbar where it was required but the published page didn’t show the scrollbar and text ran across the page. We had to go hunting through four style sheets to find the problem. It tuned out that the CSS for published pages (style.css) was missing a setting that was correct in the CSS used by the editor.
Also, the margins used for things like headings and paragraphs are huge in Twenty Ten so they had to be toned down a bit too.
Tip 5: Comment your CSS changes.
It’s not a good idea to go making wholesale changes to a CSS in a web interface such as those provided by blogging packages because you may not be able to undo the changes when it’s too late. It is best to take a bit of extra effort and comment any changes you make. For example, this:
font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
Becomes:
font-family: 'Lucida Grande', Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif; /* edit */ /* font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; */
Tip 6: Get a decent WYSIWYG web-page editor.
You will need a WYSIWYG editor if you intend to do anything more than type plain text. With a good editor you can do things like creating inline styles and link that open in another window or tab so that your reader doesn’t leave your site.
Here’s a secret… Microsoft have made SharePoint Designer available free of charge. Despite it’s name, SharePoint Designer 2007 doesn’t require you to have an expensive SharePoint Server installation. Download SharePoint Designer 2007 and use that if you don’t already have web-page design software; and if you do have such software, download it anyway because you might like it. It’s brilliant, it works, and it’s free.
SharePoint Designer 2010 will not work without a SharePoint server so don’t bother with that edition. Get SharePoint Designer 2007 while you can, though SharePoint 2007 will be
around for a while because it is used by numerous large corporations who are
slow to migrate to the latest and greatest versions of software.
Tip 7: .
Microsoft Internet Explorer is only good for downloading other browsers, and only then when you’ve done a fresh install of Windows. Google Chrome is not only very fast, it has an ‘inspect element’ feature that will help you trouble-shoot CSS and HTML problems in your blog posts:
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