It appears that some people are a bit confused about the difference between Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org. Wordpress.org is the website that hosts the Wordpress CMS development files and is where you can download the Wordpress setup files to utilize the program on your own server. Wordpress.com is also part of the overall Wordpress organization, but is a place where you can sign up for a free account and use a copy of Wordpress that is hosted by them. It’s works sort of like Livejournal or MySpace, but utilizes the Wordpress engine. If you want to get a blog site up quickly and want to do a test of the Wordpress system without having to do much work, it might be a good idea to sign up for an account at Wordpress.com and try it out.

There are differences of course. You are much more limited when using a Wordpress.com account than if you set up the program on your own server. They have a limited selection of approved plugins and themes–though the benefit is they usually just work and don’t require much if any set up. Unfortunately my plugins are not a part of their service (yet!). Also, they pay for allowing you to use their service by selling ads on your account site–money which you don’t get– and you aren’t allowed to add your own ads. Ultimately if you plan on really making any money you’ll want to transition to your own server set up.

If you don’t have webspace purchased yet and are still in the decision making stage, go get an account, it can’t hurt. It’ll get you an understanding of the basic workflow of posting.

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File naming. We all do it differently on our own computers. With Windows and OS X we have a large amount of leeway in how we can name our own files on our own computers. This is normally not an issue. It becomes an issue though when we want to use some of those files on a website. This is especially true of image or video files, though it can affect anything from documents to archive files as well.

As opposed to how personal computers work, most servers are fairly strict in how a file must be named in order to have it work correctly as part of a web page. The strict naming of files for linux servers only allows for letters, numbers, underscores (_), dashes (-) and periods (.) to be a part of the name of a file. You also must name the file as a continuous string of characters without spaces, so “my image.gif” isn’t valid but “my_image.gif” or “myimage.gif” or “my-image.gif” are valid.

This issue is particularly important for usage of Wordpress with my AWSOM Pixgallery plugin, since incorrect naming of the image files can lead to issues displaying the images. The plugin supports custom names, so once you upload your images you can input a caption/custom name in the admin menu in any way you wish for display purposes, just make sure you leave the actual file name as something that is acceptable on the server.

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One area of Wordpress setup that many people miss is changing their database prefix. This is a setting in the wp-config.php file that determines what Wordpress uses to talk to your database. By default Wordpress adds wp_ to the front of all of your tables, but you should consider changing this to something very random.

Why? Well, an exploit has just surfaced for the 2.1.3 version of Wordpress (and possibly previous versions) that allows someone to steal your admin password–but it only works if they know your Wordpress prefix. Of course since most people haven’t changed this they know to use wp_.

Unfortunately it’s not a simple fix AFTER you have installed things. The prefix gets written to your entire database, so DON’T change it now after you’ve installed and are running, it’ll cause you to create an entirely new database within your current one, but not set to your current settings. The actual fix would be to download your database .sql file and use a text editor to change the entire thing (Ugh!).

Anyway, I’m updating my install tutorial to mention this important step.

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During the discussion on a Webcomic panel I was part of at Balticon this weekend I was reminded of an important tip that I always tell people who are starting out: Even if your website will be hosted at a community website or some other site that you don’t own, the best idea is to buy a URL and point it at where your site will be.

What this means is, if you are on Drunk Duck or Webcomics Nation, or even at a friend’s webserver–if you go out and buy a domain name called say “TheBestComicYouKnow.com” and then forward to the actual website location (which might be Comicgenesis.com/TheBestComicYouKnow), whenever anyone links to your comic have them use the URL you bought, not the actual location.

Why? Well, if you get very successful you’ll eventually want to move to your own server or location using your bought URL, and you DON’T want links that mentioned you going to that old location at Comicgenesis–essentially you would end up losing those links and Google pagerank and any press or writeups since you aren’t there anymore (and don’t expect the old places to forward to your new location) –so they would go to a dead end, and traffic numbers and things on the Internet need to find you to be important.

It costs practically nothing to buy a URL per year ($15 or less per year) and forwarding costs almost nothing. In the end you’ll be thankful you thought ahead.

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The AWSOM Pixgallery Install guide is now up on the AWSOM Pixgallery page. Please read the guide to understand the steps to getting your Image gallery plugin set up and running properly on your Wordpress site. If you have any problems or need more information please use the support forum over at Harknell.com and I’ll answer as soon as I can.

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