Ad hoc Geek

I suppose the first problem I want to recount the solution of is that of getting this site up and running. That means going from nothing at all to having an account with a budget hosting company, my own domain and a WordPress installation through which I can deliver my ramblings.

If you’ve never done this kind of thing before, it can seem quite daunting. After all, there are hundreds (thousands?) of hosting companies and it’s easy to become paralysed by choice. My own advice here is to either pick a local company that has prices you can live with, or solicit recommendations from friends. If you have the time, by all means do lots of research, but if you’re looking for a budget host don’t expect to be much wiser after a few hours of hunting around on the web. You’ll probably end up paying a few pounds a month for the hosting service and around £10 a year for a .com address (a .co.uk is even cheaper – the really expensive top level domain seems to be .it at the moment, at around £50-60 per year).

Remember, you don’t have to be tied to the same hosting company forever, and with hosting so cheap at the moment you can probably afford to get it wrong, or at least, not 100% perfect. There will always be something that annoys you about the company you decide to go with, and if you accept that that’s going to be the case you can be a lot more Zen about the whole process.

I ended up going with 34SP.com, not because they’re the best, but because I’ve used them before and their prices seem, if not reasonable, then at least bearable. Setting up an account with them was as easy as buying from Amazon – it’s certainly not something to be afraid of.

With domain and hosting space acquired, the next step was to install WordPress. This was almost trivially easy because 34SP actually provide an installation script to do it for you! You may find that many hosting companies will offer this kind of service (installing WordPress seems to be a fairly common first step for new web administrators).

WordPress themes go here.

Finally, I needed to pick a WordPress theme that was slightly more interesting than the Kubrick default. I know this is something I can easily change at any time and I didn’t want to spend hours browsing the WordPress themes gallery, so I had a very quick look and settled upon Streamline for now (of course this may have changed by the time anyone actually reads this). Installation meant connecting to my site via ftp for the first time (I use FireFTP) and simply copying the unzipped theme folder into wp-content/themes. Activating the theme was done via the wordpress dashboard. Easy!

So, now I have a blog and a website to play with. Hopefully my next post will be a little more technical, but then not all solutions are technical in nature. Sometimes it’s just enough to know that something can be done without giving the average person a headache.