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Unfortunately, in order to test design and content for my blog-in-waiting, I needed to set up my local machine as a Web server and, therefore, obtain all of the necessary supporting software. Because my selection of WordPress as blog software was open source, all other software components would be open source as well.
Many open source packages go by the acronym LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP/Perl/Python). WordPress falls into this category, but it also has a WAMP configuration (Windows instead of Linux), which is my local machine’s operating system. As a result, I downloaded the WordPress 1.5 WAMP package and prepared to do battle.
Though my employees have set up these environments for years, I had never done so. I consider myself only marginally competent in such matters, and therefore dangerous when around software and standing water simultaneously.
Again, since my intent was to see how a “standard” individual would go about setting up the whole blog environment, I purposely chose not to ask any of my colleagues for help. If I couldn’t find the guidance and references on the Web, I just wouldn’t be able to proceed and do it.
After some searching, my first breakthough in finding an installation guide came from Reza Baharin. Reza’s Tutorial: Running a personal website on Apache HTTP server on WinXP is specifically tailored to WordPress.
I will get the components installed on my machine and then see in the next day or so if I can indeed get it running!
Author’s Note: I actually decided to commit to a blog on April 27, 2005, and began recording soon thereafter my steps in doing so. Because of work demands and other delays, the actual site was not released until July 18, 2005. To give my ‘Prepare to Blog …’ postings a more contemporaneous feel, I arbitrarily changed posting dates on this series one month forward, which means some aspects of the actual blog were better developed than some of these earlier posts indicate. However, the sequence and the content remain unchanged. A re-factored complete guide will be posted at the conclusion of the ‘Prepare to Blog …’ series, targeted for release about August 18, 2005. mkb
