I am most pleased that you posted, Moho! And to answer your question, I have seven actual days of school left, though I will be out of town after five (for a math tournament).
Now, onto today's topic: the creation of a free website using the Wordpress blogging engine.
Today, bored out of my skull and waiting until 7:00, at which point I was leaving to hang out with my friends, I thought to myself, Hey, wouldn't it be cool if I didn't have to rely on blogger to host my blog? Wouldn't it be great to have more control, and have more or less a fully functional web site? Spurred by a link I found in the lifehacker comments yesterday to a free web host called zymic, I decided to give it a go. All in all, the process took about an hour and a half, huge waits for slow FTP included.
You can see the end result of all of this here.
You can really do the whole thing in a few easy steps, though I had to do a lot of troubleshooting:
- Set up an account, and then a web hosting account at zymic.
- Download the wordpress engine here.
- Set up a new SQL database and a user for that database in that database section. Be sure to give that user permissions. This does not happen automatically.
- Use an FTP client like Filezilla to upload the wordpress files. From this point onward, use the instructions found here. When you are done, go on.
- Download a cool theme. Just google "wordpress themes", and pick one.
- You may have better luck than I, but I was unable to upload using the builtin uploader in the admin section of the site. Instead, you will have to FTP again, and add the unzipped theme (the whole directory) to the wp-content/themes/ directory.
- And done! You can manage your site from yourdomain.com/wp-admin/
Just a note, I could not get my website to word in the browser I made the site in. I suspect that this is due to something involving cookies, as I was redirected to a zymic splash page that said, more or less, "This guy hasn't changed his index.html file." (Wordpress, as do most dynamic sites, uses an index.php file.) This error passes eventually, I suspect once the cookie expires.
If you didn't understand some of these terms there's a really helpful website here.
Note: Holy shit. I'm glad this auto-saved, because I accidentally closed my browser. Almost had a heart-attack there.
Subnote: I almost just spelled "heart" wrong. Wow.
Note: Holy shit. I'm glad this auto-saved, because I accidentally closed my browser. Almost had a heart-attack there.
Subnote: I almost just spelled "heart" wrong. Wow.