I began adding content to the site. I’ll be working on a master to do list for all site readiness functions. My plan at this point is to work on the AI3 site daily, work out an acceptable time-of-day/effort routine, and get all baseline functionality and content in place prior to an "official" release.

My hope is that the site can go "live" in the next 2-3 weeks.

 

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

Kevin Klawonn, BrightPlanet’s sys admin, got the basic blog package I had set up on my local machine transferred and installed on commercial servers. His report on this transfer follows:

Like most sysadmins out there, my plate is always full. So when I was asked to install WordPress I was hoping that it would be a simple installation taking less than 30 minutes to review the installation procedure, install the software, and then make the necessary configuration changes. Upon visiting the WordPress website, I saw the "5 Minute Installation" page and started laughing because my karma isn’t good enough that I should actually be able to have WordPress installed in 5 minutes.

I perused the requirements:

• PHP v4.1 or greater. I had installed PHP before and this is a simple install
• MySQL v3.23.23 or greater. I have MySQL installed on another server so this requirement was already met
• Apache module mod_rewrite support. This was going to be the most difficult part of the installation.

The server identified to host WordPress already has IIS running on it and therefore did not have mod_rewrite support built in. Instead of finding a 3rd party option for this requirement, I decided to install Apache 2.0 on the same server. To accomplish this, I needed to force IIS to bind only to the IP Addresses which it actually uses. By default IIS binds to all IP Addresses of the server whether they are used or not. A Microsoft support topicI had used before explains how to accomplish this task; in my previous experience I had no side effects so I felt comfortable doing the same thing in this situation. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=http://support.microsoft.com:80/support/kb/articles/Q238/1/31.ASP&NoWebContent=1

Once done configuring IIS, I added another IP address to the server, opened port 80 in the firewall to the new IP Address and installed Apache 2.0 configuring it to use the new IP Address. I then installed PHP, and configured Apache to use PHP.

The final step before installing WordPress was to setup a database on MySQL. Although MySQL resided on a different server, this did not matter to the configuration of WordPress. I created a new database and user for WordPress to use.

Finally, I was ready to install the actual WordPress software. I uploaded the zip file to the webserver and unzipped it. I edited the wp-config-sample.php file per the "5 Minute Installation" instructions. Once the database information was configured, I opened my web browser and ran the http://{website}/wp-admin/install.php script. And in just that quick the blog website was setup.

Great work, Kevin, and other than some minor file references, I am now in a position to begin transfering what I had been prototyping locally.

 

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

I have completed general design and functionality specifications for how I’d like the Wiki portions of my site and the dynamic placement (deep categories) aspect of my site to work.

I’ll use a later post to parse the Wiki specs against available open source packages to pick a final candidate.

In addition, I have also been assembling much prior content and deciding how much of it, if any, I will convert and use to "prime the pump" for the initial release of AI3.

 

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

I’ve now completed the design I like for how posts display, and how comments and prompts display and look.

 

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

I have just spent an incredibly frustrating amount of time trying to figure out why I could not get images to display in WordPress. Use of a local server certainly adds to the challenge and complexity of learning about this stuff.

I ultimately realized that the internal link references needed to be like the local URL addresses in the browser. Localhost needs to be explicity spelled out, and also in the reference position for where the root Web server directory resides. Thus, for my local installation, this becomes:

<img alt="This is My Photo" src="http://localhost/wordpress/wp-content/themes/myTheme/images/myPhoto.jpg" />

This change to the relative addressing now has imaging displaying properly.

 

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