Blog Hosting

Blog and Blogging Knowledge

What Is A Blog?

Short for "web log", a blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. People can post comments or messages and others may view and respond to the posts.

Blogs are typically updated daily using software that allows people update and maintain the blog. The activity of updating a blog is "blogging" and someone who keeps a blog is a "blogger."

Where to Start For Blogging?

When you decide to create a blog, you may wonder where to start and how to blog. The easiest way to start a blog is using a hosted blogging platform. The most popular free blogging services providers are blogger.com and wordpress.com. You can get started on your blog very easily, with a few simple setup steps.

Blogger is a free blog publishing tool from Google for easily sharing your thoughts with the world. Blogger makes it simple to post text, photos and video.

WordPress is open source blogging software. All you need is an email address. You’ll get your own WordPress.com address (like youblog.wordpress.com), a selection of great free and customizable designs for your blog.

Free blogging publishing tools are good enough for most personal and family bloggers. For professional and business bloggers, the obvious disadvantages with free blogging services – is that you can not use your own domain name.

If you use Google Blogger, your website address would be like yourblog.blogspot.com; and if you use WordPress, the website address would be like yourblog.wordpress.com. This may not bother some people; but most professional bloggers or online business webmasters prefer to have their blogs hosted at their own domain or sub-domain names, like myblog.com, or blog.mydomain.com. Finding a good blog hosting provider will make it easy.

What Blog Software Does A Web Host Offer?

The most popular blog plugins are WordPress and b2evolution. Both are free with cheap blog hosting packages. Many cheap web hosts preinstall blog software for their customers. The software is very easy to set up.

How to Install Blog Software with Your Web Hosting Control Panel?

Many blog hosting providers offer one-click installation. As long as you give the path and click your mouse to start installation, the blog software will be installed and be configured right away.

For example, use cPanel of HostMonster to install WordPress:
1. Log into your HostMonster control panel
2. Select 'Fantastico' from the 'Scripts & Stats' section
3. Find the section in Fantastico called 'Blogs' and select 'WordPress' -- a WordPress information screen will load
4. Place your mouse over the bold text 'New Installation' and click the link
5. Follow the prompts given by Fantastico, then complete the installation
Fantastico will populate the default files and databases for a brand new installation of WordPress in whatever location on any domain attached to your account which you specify.

How to Install Wordpress Yourself?

WordPress is a most popular and powerful online blog platform. Most web hosts offer free WordPress plugin with easy installation. But, some installations have to follow the path like: www.yourdomain.com/wordpress/. Is this the url of your blog you want to be after paying your own hosting fee? Absolutely not.

You want your blog website url looks like: www.yourdomain.com or maybe www.blog.yourdomain.com. So you need to install WordPress yourself. The installation is very easy; you can follow the guide of installing WordPress.

To run WordPress, make sure PHP version 4.3 or greater and MySQL version 4.0 or greater are included in your hosting package.

Here is WordPress “Famous 5-Minute Install” with some notes:

1. Download and unzip the WordPress package. (The unzipped files are in fold “wordpress” by default.)

2. Create a database for WordPress on your web server, as well as a MySQL user who has all privileges for accessing and modifying it.

3. Rename the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php.

4. Open wp-config.php in your favorite text editor (like "notepad") and fill in your database details.

5. Place the WordPress files in the desired location on your web server:
a. If you want to integrate WordPress into the root of your domain (e.g. http://yourdomain.com/), upload all contents of WordPress directory into the root directory of your web server. (Don’t upload the folder “wordpress”; upload all files in the folder. Because if you upload whole folder of “wordpress”, the folder name “wordpress” will becomes a subdirectory, that means the url will be http://yourdomain.com/wordpress/).
b. If you want to have your WordPress installation in its own subdirectory on your web site (e.g. http://yourdomain.com/blog/), rename the directory wordpress to the name you'd like the subdirectory to have and move or upload it to your web server. For example if you want the WordPress installation in a subdirectory called "blog", you should rename the directory called "wordpress" to "blog" and upload it to the root directory of your web server.

6. Run the WordPress installation script by accessing wp-admin/install.php in your favorite web browser.
a. If you installed WordPress in the root directory, you should visit: http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/install.php (change "yourdomain" with your real domain name, and put the url into your browser's address bar)
b. If you installed WordPress in its own subdirectory called blog, for example, you should visit: http://yourdomain.com/blog/wp-admin/install.php

That's it! WordPress should now be installed.

Learn Something before Creating a Blog Website

When WordPress has been installed, you have your blogging tool. Now you need to know what the tool can do and how to do. WordPress Lessons teaches you how to create a professional blog website, such as: Blog Design and Layout, Using WordPress Themes, HTML to XHTML, CSS Information and Techniques, Finding Your CSS Styles, Using Images, Designing Headers, CSS Horizontal Menus, etc.