WordPress has as long as I’ve been blogging the defacto standard of a blog web application so I had quite large expectations, which I’m glad to say were not only met but exceeded by tremendous margin. In essense its a simple idea, you have an admin section and a blog section. You write your posts in the admin section and you and others can view the posts you’ve written in the blog section. I could go on for pages about wordpress and its features, but for brevity and relevance sake I’ll keep it to the few that I use.

• Media Library
  Its a simple idea, you upload a file unto your webserver, you give it a description, a caption and a title, you can find it and reuse it later.
• Full Screen Blogging
  I have a lot of space on my monitor, I really like that wordpress allows me to make use of it. It means I can look back at the start of my post when I’m at the end trying to recap and make everything fit together.
• Plugins, Upgrading and Themes
  I’ve never had a web application that has upgraded so easily. Installing took seconds, I didn’t have to do any FTPing or editing of php files. I’ve reached the stage where that just isn’t fun anymore. I installed Google Sitemaps which keeps google up to date about my blog posts, akismet was already installed which keeps spam away and installed wordpress stats (similar idea to google analytics) which keeps me informed of how my blog is doing in terms of web hits.
• Free Tagging
  You can add whatever tags you like to a post, which help with Search Engine Optimization and simply searching for relevant data.
• Ajax Autosave
  Your blog post automatically saves regularly. So if your computer crashes you can return to your last save easily.
• Usability
  Its really very simple and easy to use, everything you’d expect to be there is, and if its not you can get a plugin to do it and almost everything is where you’d expect it to be.

If you’re thinking of starting a blog I’d recommend wordpress no matter what your technical level or enthusiasm, get yourself a cheap hosting plan and you’ll have it going in no time. I won’t write a tutorial and let you google it instead but I don’t expect you’ll find problems.

My single complaint with it, is the firefox becomes a bit of a processor hog on my parents machine, probably due to all the javascript running.
Had to switch over to google chrome just to be able to type without it stalling, although that may be a reflection on my parents computer and firefox than WordPress.

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I had wordpress set up using their cp, I clicked install it worked, I was impressed. Then I noticed that the upgrade feature wasn’t working, I tried even chmoding recursively to 777 (publically writable), no dice, it kept saying I had to ftp the upgrade. Unfortunately you can’t create an ftp directory that points at the folder of one of the cp installed web applications so that wasn’t an option. So then I tried moving the directory to the website root and removing the application because I had it setup on ‘/’ (http://www.lacy.ie/). Of course what is the first thing you forget to do when you delete something, that’s right backup! Miracle of miracles I actually remembered, funny thing is, the database names of the cp created web applications are restricted and so I couldn’t restore the database once it was deleted by the web app uninstall because I couldn’t recreate the database, oh and I forgot to mention you can’t choose the database you want to restore to. So my blog was down for at least a day while I waited for BK to get back to me and fix the problem.

Eventually they did and it was all fine, they even explained to me that the problem with permissions was actually that I had it set to php4 as well as php5 and php4 was used by default. The reason php 5 handles this better than php4 is probably something to do with how php5 is running, what should be happening is that the script is being run by the script owner but what was actually happening under php4 was that all php processes were being run as the same user. Now imagine my surprise when I couldn’t find php4 control panel. All I could find was “PHP Support” and “PHP5 Support”. Ok I want php, and I want php5, its just php4 I don’t want. But wait, I said to myself, this control panel wasn’t designed to make sense, and so I unchecked the php support option and my php based application worked fine. If you are looking for hosting, come down the rabbit hole at blacknight

See PHP Support AND/OR PHP5 Support

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