Yesterday, I started a new blog, and I thought I would document all the technical details of setting it up, partly for my own future reference and partly to help out others who want to go all out and do this thing properly.

This step-by-step is for the Wordpress blogging platform:

1. Register a domain name and sign up with a web host. I currently use Lunarpages. They have great hosting plans at very competitive rates with good technical support when you need it.
2. Install Wordpress.  You may need to download it from wordpress.org.  If you are using Lunarpages, they have a simple click through installation using Fantastico.
3. Explore the thousands of Wordpress Themes available and pick one you like.  A good place to start is the Wordpress site.
4. Download the theme, unzip it, and upload it via FTP to your “blogdomain/wp-content/themes” directory. For FTP, I use the FireFTP plugin in combination with Mozilla’s Firefox web browser.
5. Now comes the fun part, customizing your Wordpress installation.  For a detailed look at what all you can do to customize everything from timestamps to maximum comment links, check out the Wordpress Codex, Blog and Forums.
6. Something else you’ll want to look into are plugins. There are way too many of these all waiting for you to bloat your blog with them. Here are the ones I use regularly and find very useful:
   1. Akismet spam blocker. This does an excellent job of keeping comment spam at bay.
   2. Google Analytics for Wordpress. A best-of-breed website statistics suite. You’ll need a Google Account.
   3. Wordpress Stats. For when you just want to see simple statistics in a very elegant way. I actually prefer using this over Google’s most of the time. You’ll need a Wordpress.com account.
   4. Google sitemap generator.  This tells the “big three” search engines (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) how to list your website in their search results.
   5. All-in-one SEO Pack.  Used in conjunction with Google’s keyword tool, you can drive more search engine users to your website with carefully crafted page titles, meta tags, keyword rich content etc. This is just one tool in a Search Engine Optimizer’s toolkit of wizardry.  It works quite well.
7. One last step I usually take is publishing a feed using the Feedburner service.  This gives you detailed statistics on who has subscribed to your blog with a feed reader of their choice (example: Google Reader) or via their email.  There are many more features to this service, but statistics is what I mainly use it for.
8. Once your blog is set up, you can start posting about whatever fires you up to start writing or linking, or embedding media from other websites.  I may write more about this last process in a future post.

Posted on September 18th, 2008 by Josh Champagne
Filed under: Audio / Video, Bible Study, Computers & Technical, Research & Learning