If you are like many WHS owners, you leave your WHS on 24/7. Kind of a waste of energy for the most part, but what the heck, right? One of the things you can do, however, that requires 24/7 access is to host a website on your WHS. And specifically, a blogging site.
Sure, you get can on Facebook, MySpace, MSN Live Spaces (actually, you can set up a pretty decent blog here), and countless other social sites. Or get on Twitter and twitter away. But you are limited by what these different sites are capable of and, of course, you don’t have quite the ownership that goes along with hosting your own site.
So, have you been hankering to do so but were uncertain, lost or just plain scared to do it? You can place me in any or all of the previous. It was about time I got past all that and just did it.
WGS uses WordPress as the publishing platform for the WGS blog. Since I was already familiar with WordPress, this is the blogging platform I wanted to use for my own personal blog.
What follows are the links to the WGS wiki articles I used to guide me through the installation/configuration of the required components to get my (and your) WHS blogging site up and running. Please note that I do not have a pictorial step-by-step guide for you documented here. I was not doing this originally for an article idea on WGS. This was a personal adventure and I am NOT going to delete all the work I went through to provide this kind of documentation. I am not a glutton for punishment and while installing/configuring all the required components is not difficult, it is also not difficult to screw it up.
INSTALL PHP and MySQL
First, go to this WGS wiki article. This article will guide you through the steps required to install and configure both PHP and MySQL. I am not going to copy and paste everything from the wiki to this article. Just go there, follow the directions and come back here.
I’ll just whistle along to “Whistle while you work” until you get back here!
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Done? Good! That was not too bad, was it? But wait, there is more!
INSTALL WordPress
Now, you will need to install WordPress. So, you will need to go to this WGS wiki article. This article will guide you through the steps required to install and configure WordPress. Once again, I am not going to copy and paste everything from the wiki to this article. Just go there, follow the directions and come back here.
I hate to repeat myself, but, one more time! I’ll just whistle along to “Whistle while you work” until you get back here!
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Done? Good! That was easy, wasn’t it? Ready to write your first blog? You could, but you might want to do a few more things yet. Namely:
CONFIGURE WordPress
In order to configure WordPress, you need to log in to your WordPress dashboard. When you do do, you will be presented with a screen similar to the one below. Similar in that your dashboard will have nothing configured, while mine has a *few* things already done.
I am not going to go through every single item on the menu to the left. Some are for editing posts (the Posts option). Some I have not done much with yet, and you need to explore and learn a bit yourself, right? I am going to point you to a few of the areas you really need to address.
When installed, WordPress creates a set of links to various sections of the WordPress website. I would recommend you either leave them there (for reference) or copy/past them into your browser favorites. You will need to consult the website for various items.
Moving on, one of the first things I did was to go to this section and add some links that I consider important enough to suggest to any visitors and act as my own reference. Just click on the Add New option and fill in the blanks.
While you are at it, you might wish to categorize some of those links. Click on the Link Categories option, and add/edit/delete as desired.
The Home page of your website contains your blog posts. If you want to add or edit pages, click on the Pages option. As you can see below, I have already added a few pages.
The following picture gives you an idea of what you can do to create a Page on your site. You can also add additional pages that contain a single post (like the About page), an Archive page for all your blog posts, an Image Gallery (I have not played with this yet), or a Sitemap (sometimes these can be useful on large commercial websites). You can create links that will direct you to a specific URL. For example, if you click on the Add-in page on the We Got Served blog, it redirects you to the Terry’s new add-in site.
My blog site is rather simple at the moment, so I have not investigated how to do that redirect bit. That will be something new for me to learn when needed.
Moving along, we come to the Appearance options. I guarantee you will spend a lot of time here at the beginning. After all, this is where you make your website YOURS. This is where you decide what your website will look like. WordPress installs 2 themes during the initial installation process. I would suggest you activate (install) them to get a feel for what you get by default. Once you have checked those out, WordPress has a section of their site devoted to Themes. Peruse to your heart’s content.
I currently have 15 to 20 free themes in my WordPress folders. If you want more, you can pay for various themes, and the commercial theme sites usually have a few freebies to let you try. Since you are just starting out grab a few, or more, of the free ones and try them on for size. What is nice is that you can change themes at any time, also, without causing you to recreate your website.
Do I have any suggestions? Everyone is different with different requirements, so the answer is take a look at mine. If you like what you see, there is a link at the bottom of the page. If not, click on the link above.
Part of the Appearances section contains an item named Widgets. WordPress contains several as part of the base installation, and you can always get many more. Customize to your heart’s delight!
WordPress can do a lot of neat things, but you must remember that it is basically an engine. Themes, widgets, and plugins are the wrappings to put it all together. An example of one widget is one the default widgets called Text. Add it, and when you edit it, you get the something like what follows (originally without any text):
What you can do is add text. Period. No editing functions. No graphics. No nothing. Looks pretty worthless, doesn’t it? If you look at the text I have in my Text Box, you will notice a bunch of HTML code. If you are fluent with this kind of stuff, you have already stopped reading this article. If you are like the rest of us HTML chumps, your question is how did I generate that? Quite easy, actually. Create a post, dump in whatever text and graphics you want
click on the HTML tab at the top right, highlight, copy and paste into that text box.
I used a different article as an example in the above 2 pictures, but what the actual verbiage I have in my text box above translates to the following when viewed on my website:
Embedded into each picture above is a link to various web pages at Crystalfontz or Microsoft. I am sure there are more elegant widget/plugin tools out there to do what I did. But this one worked quite well for me.
What follows is the Editor function for PHP/HTML code contained in your current theme. I only point this out to say it is there. Once again, if you are fluent with this kind of stuff, you have already stopped reading this article. If you are like the rest of us HTML chumps, avoid this section at all cost! Unless you really know what you are doing, you can mess up your whole WordPress install.
Back to some more pertinent items. Plugins are next on the list. Widgets are for the frontend of your website. Plugins are for the backend of your website. In both cases, there are tons of items you can add. Go to the WordPress website and peruse all you want.
Two handy plugins that I found can be seen below. Editor Extender is a must have, as it includes many editing functions that are not included in the base WordPress installation, and My Page Order is a nice one that allows you to rearrange your… page order.
As your blog site gains more traffic, you will get many kinds of readers making all sorts of comments. Some are nice (cool site!), some are not so nice (blah site!), and some you don’t want on your site (porn links). WordPress includes a plugin called Akismet that does a pretty good job of filtering out all sorts of spam.
The only thing I have to say is INSTALL it. NOW! Why? The following pix was taken from the backend of the WGS site.
Read the whole thing, especially the bottom portion. Need I say more?
What follows is a few sections in the Settings tab. Fill in or edit the appropriate options as needed and you are now set to go.
I wanted to show you the following page in particular, however. WordPress gives you 10 lines for a text box when creating/editing posts. Pretty worthless if you ask me. As you can see, I changed this to 75 lines.
So that is where I am currently at in my website creating skills. I have only scratched the surface of what you can do, so if you have a favorite plugin, widget, or tip to pass on, let us know in the comment section. I know that I will be checking them out.
USE WordPress
Well, here we are. So far, all I have talked about is how to setup your blog site. We are now all set to actually DO something. As in write your first blog post. You have a couple of options here. I will simply show you what I use. If anyone has other options, let us know.
First, you can do all your writing in the WordPress editor. Which will work just fine for small posts that most people might make in a personal blog. When writing a longer or more complicated post (such as this one), you will really want to do as much as you can on a local machine prior to uploading it to WordPress.
A really great tool that is completely free to use is a program that is published by none other than Microsoft. This handy little tool, which is what I am using at this very moment, is part of the Microsoft Live programs called Windows Live Writer.
If you take a close look, the picture above is at that exact point in this article prior to the insertion of this picture (minus any edits). Kind of interesting in itself, right?
Anyway, Live Writer is optimized for writing blog articles and easily interfaces with popular blogging programs like WordPress. And since you are doing everything local, you don’t have to worry about internet lags to upload and insert pictures, or even to type in text.
When you are done with your article, simply upload it to your blog. If you have to do some minor edits at that point, use the WordPress editor. Now it is time to be brave. Click on that publish button and you have just published your first article on your blog site located on your Windows Home Server.
Create some great content, promote your site, generate traffic, get some advertising going, sit back, and watch the money roll in.
If I may suggest, though, don’t quit your day job. At least not for awhile.
And if you do take a look at my blog site, please remember that this thing is only a week old and very much in the work-in-progress mode. I really need to add some WHS content. Guess what? This article will be of those adds! And I will be adding a lot more content over time. Again, I just basically finished setting this monster up…
Oh, and I guess I should start leaving my server on all the time. Need to generate that traffic to get ads to generate revenue so that I can retire on that income in about the year …… 2109!
Examples:
And before I can wrap this up, some examples of Windows Home Server blog sites:
- JC634’s WHS blog site My work-in-progress
- Drashna’s WHS blog site A bit more polished than mine
Final Thoughts:
There may be many questions that come up as a result of this article. Did you succeed in installing all the components? If you need help on installation or any other aspect of starting up a blog, submitting a comment asking for help will probably not generate a very good answer.
Suggestions, great! Kudos, sure! Blahs, meh OK… Comment away in those areas. I think you all understand, right?
If you need help, ask for it in the WGS forums. If you prefer, I can start a support post in the forums for this specific article. Let me know, as a suggestion.
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