One of the most intimidating parts of this project so far is figuring out how to even start a blog. There are so many ways to do it, and Kor is like, “you should program your own blog, that would be a great project”. Which he is right, that would be a great project...except I wouldn’t actually be able to blog about the process of learning how to program my blog if I didn’t already have a blog. It is on my list of things to learn.
How do I even start a blog?
I needed to figure out what exactly a blog was and how to start one. Being as resourceful as I am, I turned to Google and typed, “How to Start a Blog”. I found a great article written by Mike Wallagher explaining the different blog hosting services like blogger.com or blogspot.com and initially I decided that I would take Mike’s advice and try to host my own blog. I know that Kor has some kind of server (not sure yet what that means - I will add that to my list of things to learn) somewhere that could probably host the blog (connect the blog to the internet so people like you can read it!).
However, I started trying to follow Mike’s advice, and it started with:
“In order to install your blog manually to any host, you need to know the following requirements:
- PHP 4.2 or greater
- MySQL 4.0 or greater
- At least 1GB free disk space”
Woah. What? PHP? MySQL?
I messaged Kor and asked him if his server fit the requirements and then I realized that I didn’t actually know what any of those requirements meant. As part of my charter for keeping this blog is - “thou shall not rely on Kor to figure it out for you”, I figured I should at least know what “PHP 4.2 or greater, MySQL 4.0 or greater, at least 1 GB free disk space” actually means so that when Kor checks his server capabilities, I know what he is referring to. So, here is a tangent:
PHP 4.2 or greater: This is a bit of a rabbit hole because from what I can read, PHP appears to be another kind of programming language that can be embedded in HTML. Now, tackling languages is on my list of things to do and I think diving into PHP and how it relates to my blog is perhaps a bit advanced for me right now - so I’m just going to table this discussion for now and link back to it when I explore scripting languages. For now, I am satisfied to have learned that PHP does not stand for “Puppies Hugging Puppies” but instead refers to a scripting language for webpages.
MySQL 4.0 or greater: Again, as above, I think this topic deserves an entire post on its own and I will revisit this so that I can properly expand on what exactly SQL is, but for now my reading suggests that MySQL is a relational database software that allows the blog to be searchable/tag-able. I will check this with Kor.
So back off the tangent, I now needed to download wordpress and get started.
After downloading Wordpress and trying to install it I felt overwhelmed and thought that it was perhaps a bit advanced for me. My suspicions were confirmed when Kor responded,
“You don’t want to start with Wordpress. It is flaky, unstable and probably a bit advanced for you. You want to start with something like Google’s blogger that is linked to your Google+ account instead and then migrate your blog over to a wordpress site or something you program yourself later on.”
Was Kor’s opinion reflected in others? I searched “Pros and Cons of Wordpress” and found a great number of articles that reflected the same cons he was talking about but also the advantages of using Wordpress, also known as a Content Management System, or CMS.
Okay, so Wordpress is a great blogging platform used by many around the world. It has a lot of plug-ins and a bunch of themes, but it also is targeted by hackers, can be flaky in the HTML and is perhaps a bit more complicated than where I’m at currently. Blogger also seems to have all the functionality of what I want right now. Kor is right (and he almost always is...except when I’m right).
I’ve made the decision to start my blogging adventure on blogger.com - the Google owned blogging platform. My intention is to eventually create my own website to host my blog on my own URL - www.employabilityproject.com, but for now, that site is still under construction.
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