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Geeks Blogging Tips Part 1 and 2
The Geeks.com website hosts a ton of hardware and software tips and tutorials, which is a neat bonus in addition to their tech sales items. They just posted a 2 part series on blogging software which may benefit some of you who are looking for some software or ideas on what to do with your site.
Part 1:
http://www.geeks.com/techtips/2007/techtips-22JUL07.htm
Part 2:
http://www.geeks.com/techtips/2007/techtips-29JUL07.htm
How To: Test Your Site On Your Own PC
I can’t stress more strongly the need for testing of a new or updated website before it goes live. This is true with WordPress or any other method of setting up a website. The problem I hear the most in regard to this though is most people don’t know how to set up a non-live (as in not visible on the internet and open to anyone going to it) version of their site to do the testing, usually on their own PC. Well, Mac users really have no excuse, since being based on Linux it has a web server built into the regular OS, all you need to do is go to your preferences area and enable it (I won’t bother explaining how to do this, there are millions of google sites that will do that for you).
For Windows users it has traditionally been a whole lot harder. Windows doesn’t really have any support for doing web server services built into it–and in most cases actively makes it hard to get this working. It’s also not really a great idea (in my opinion) to utilize the Windows server system of web services (known as IIS) even if you could since they are really not that great–and most of the world still uses Linux style web services (known as Apache).
So what are Windows users able to use? Luckily a group of people realized this lack and built their own pseudo-Linux style web services install for Windows called XAMPP. The group is called the Apache Friends and they actually have set ups for pretty much every platform also. On Windows the web server package is a simple .exe file that you download and install. At first it might seem a little daunting, but it’s really pretty easy once you get it installed. Instead of going to a “real” web page in your web browser, you instead go to “localhost”, with everything else a branch off of that (so it’s like localhost/mywebsite/). Read their setup instructions and you should be able to figure out where to put your wordpress files.
For the novice the best usage of this environment is to tweak your WordPress themes or try out plugins. Once you finish with these files you can simply copy them to your live web server.
WordPress.com versus WordPress.org
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.
Little Tips 2
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.
Change your WordPress prefix
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.