Art of Blogging

As you start hacking your blog into shape, sooner or later, you will break it. This can range from a simple “oops” to something catastrophic. Obviously, the second end of the spectrum is very bad.

Setting up a new theme can sometimes take hours if a lot of changes are needed or you are learning something new. Having your blog not work while you learn how to hack it up is never a good thing. Strangely enough, learning how to modify a blog theme is much more stressful when you know that your blog is broken.

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Sometimes you have to move from one server to another. It can be a daunting task and can be catastrophic to your online presence. It is best to be prepared. Properly prepared, migrating a live install of WordPress is a fairly simple procedure.

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Immediately after installing WordPress, I configure it with the basics.

Go to Manage –>Posts and edit the default first post or delete it.

Go to Manage –>Comments and edit the default first comment or delete it.

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These are specific instructions for installing WordPress 2.

I hope they help!

Step One: Create a database for your blog. Create a user and access rules for that DB as needed.

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Blog’s all have a navigation column and in WordPress, this is called the Sidebar. The actual file that controls this located in your themes/ directory and is called sidebar.php. If you want to add things like advertisement to your sidebar, this is the file to edit. Notice, if you change your blog theme, you will have to edit the new sidebar.php in the new theme. Today, I will show you how to find this file and how to edit it.

Before we get started…

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Go figure, to blog, you need to have a blog. There are many free blogs and blog scripts out and about so paying for blog software is not really a good idea for most of us. If you want to spend absolutely $0 then you want to use a blog service. If you don’t mind spending a few dollars, I heartily recommend hosting your own blog if you have the knowledge.

If free is for you, MySpace has free blog space. Blogger does the same without all the cheesiness of MySpace. There are MANY free blog services!

If it’s free, why is this post going to continue? Quite simply, there are downsides to the free alternatives ranging from lack of flexibility to inability to run advertisement or being associated with splogs. TANSTAAFL!

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