How A Blog Becomes Reality

Introduction

Do you have an idea worth sharing? Perhaps you have a series of life experiences you would like to document, or preserve for your children, and/or the general public? Maybe you just want a place to vent where you have total control? A blog may be in your future. In this post, we will discuss the major components of building a blog like this one, in general terms. For more specific steps and instructions, you can drill deeper into various steps of the building process.

Perhaps the easiest way to get started is to find a reseller and get an account. I don’t recommend this because you will not have control of your domain. Moreover, your hosted website may look something like this:

YourBlogName.YourHostsName.com or
YourHostsName.com/YourBlogName

The real kicker is the reseller is simply selling software that is free to begin with.

Development Computer

For a no cost approach to develop the skills before you plunk down some dollars, try these ideas:

Practice and hone your skills on a different computer. Two ways to approach this are a) get a different computer – an old laptop or desktop is just fine, and b) virtualization.

A) Get a Different Computer

You could perhaps breathe life into an old workstation or laptop. Don’t worry, we will use a flavor of Linux called Ubuntu. All distributions of Linux are inherently much less resource intensive than Windows, so Linux often runs very well on older, slower hardware. You can read more on this process here: Ubuntu

B) Virtualization Software

If you go the virtualization route, the outermost computer, or “host” computer, should be powerful with plenty of memory, because it will be sharing resources with the “guest” computer. In this way we can run an entire computer inside a window of the host computer, and the virtualization software manages the shared resources. I recommend the free and open source VirtualBox from https://www.virtualbox.org. You can read more about VitualBox here. LINK

Web Server Software

If you’ve made it this far, then we have a development server we can work on, practice, crash, rebuild, and never once compromise our primary computer. Great! However, we only have a working operating system. We need to configure some additional software to make the development process work. We’ll need a web server (Apache), a database solution (MySQL), a programming language (PHP), tools to manage the aforementioned things (phpMyAdmin), and maybe ssh or ftp to move files around. Learning each of these solutions is certainly fun, but much too time consuming. Therefore, I recommend you use XAMPP, from www.apachefriends.org, because they packaged all of the necessary tools to build a development web server into an easy to install and manage tool. Learn more about XAMPP here: LINK

Blogging Software

At this point, we have another computer acting as server, with web server tools and software installed. Now we want to build a blog, or build a website. Although you can technically build web pages with a simple text editor, the task is quite complex. So to make things easier, the folks at WordPress have built an entire solution for content management, including e-commerce. According to their site, 42% of the web is built on WordPress. This, too, is open source and free! Learn more here: LINK

Conclusion

If you have followed all of this blog post successfully, then you will have a web server stand alone or virtualized computer, with a live installation of WordPress. You should be able to access your site from an internal IP address in your home network, or in the case of a virtualized machine, you could even go to https://localhost. Now you can focus on building content, and presenting your message with words, images, video, color, links, and all the other ways the Internet allows us to communicate. Cost? lots of your time, but no money spent.