A couple weeks ago, I attended a seminar on social media, and I got to thinking. It is high-time that I joined the twenty-first century. But, where to begin? Do I start with Facebook? Maybe I should start with Twitter. Not so fast. I decided to start with the original, and simplest, of online, social media. I would create a blog.
The first step in blogging is you need an account established with one of the many, free blogging services. Wordpress is one such service. If you already have a Web hosting account, the service provider may already have the tools for you. You can have your blog located at a Web address of your own. That’s what I did.
My company’s Web site, and this blog, is hosted by 1&1 Internet, Inc. I went to my account’s control panel and located the link to setting up a blog and followed the onscreen instructions.
When you set up a blog using 1&1’s built in tool, one of the first things you are asked to do is select a domain for the new blog. At this location in the control panel, they don’t give you the opportunity to establish a subdomain. They don’t even give you the option of establishing the blog under a sub-directory, so you can’t have an address such as www.example.com/blog. If you want to establish your blog on a subdomain, such as blog.example.com, then you need to create this first, under the Domains section of the 1&1control panel. If you want to use the sub-directory method, you are out of luck.
Why would you want to establish your blog on a sub-directory or a subdomain? Well, if you already have a Web site and do not wish to replace it, then you will need to use one of these options. If you are creating a blog for personal use, then an address such as www.sampleblog.com would do just fine. In fact, this is another option for those of you with a Web site. Simply create an additional domain. I chose the subdomain route, as it is simpler (you don’t have to worry about name availability).
One big problem I had with 1&1’s blogging tool is that they lock you out of creating your own theme. You have little choice in layout and graphics. Sure, they give you a number of pre-made themes, but the list is limited, and you can’t edit them. As I already have a Web site, I wanted the ability to match the graphics, to make the blog look as though it should actually be associated with the Web site.
I stumbled upon a wonderful workaround, though. While mucking about in the configuration options for the 1&1 generated blog, I had to follow the help links because there were a few items I did not yet understand. The help links took me to another site, codex.wordpress.org, and it’s parent, www.wordpress.org. While reading the help information found on this Web site, I discovered a section on installation. All I had to do was go to the 1&1 control panel, create a MySQL database, download the zip file, unzip the file, edit one of the files to include information gathered during the database setup process, upload the unzipped files to my Web space, navigate to an install file using my Web browser, and my total time was under five minutes! In under five minutes, I had a workaround for modifying the blog’s graphical appearance (I now have access to the script files). Doing this also provides a workaround to the sub-directory restriction!
This solution can work for any Web hosting service, not just 1&1.
A word about WordPress. True, they are a blog hosting service. But they have made their software available, for free!, to anyone who wishes to self-host their own blog! Go to WordPress.com for the blog hosting service and WordPress.org for the self-hosting software.