Blog for the Mass

It seemed that Blog culture has arrived at Siemens, and i’m happy for that. Visit the Blogger von Siemens which is managed by the Communication Department of Siemens Corporation in Iselin (please correct me if i’m wrong). Other than that and my workplace blog here i don’t know if there are any other blogs within Siemens. In his post , Stephan Meyer-Ewald ask other Siemens bloggers to communicate their blogs if they do have one. That would be great, because as a matter of fact blog in many cases offers us new way to communicate and improve the way how you publish or find solution for certain problem better than what web forums can do.

Now enough for the intro, this post should give you a brief tutorial on how to set up your blog using WordPress 1.5. This blog application is the one i use for my workplace blog. WordPress is one of the famous blog application among bloggers and the recent version 1.5 was released february 1st 2005 and has been downloaded for 305,245 times! So it is a good reason to use this application. A good reason if meet the following requirement:

1. You have a running PHP
2. You habe a running MySQL database
3. Optional: Your Server supports mod_rewrite to create a clean and short URL
4. You know a bit how a web site works: uploading to web server, changing a bit configuration using browser

So if you have all of that, now you need to download the recent WordPress. After that unzip it to your web server or whereever you wan’t before you upload them to the server latter. The next step is creating the database WordPress in your database server and also username and password for that database, don’t worry about that database stuff, it is really easy, just create one database and that’s all without have to structure tables etc. The rest is done over the web based configuration latter.

In the root folder of your WordPress installation you find a file “web-config-sample.php”. Open it with text editor or HTML editor and make some changes to match your environment. You will need to change the following line:

1. define(’DB_NAME’, ‘change_with_your_database_name’)
2. define(’DB_USER’, ‘change_with_username_for_the_database’)
3. define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ‘enter_your_database_password’)
4. define(’DB_HOST’, ‘change_with_your_server_address’)

after that save the file as web-config.php.

Now you can upload the file to your live web server and open the installation page. The installation page is located in the wp-admin directory, so if you upload the files to for example http://www.myblog.com, your installation page is in http://www.myblog.com/wp-admin/install.php. The installation page welcomes you before you close the installation processes with only two easy steps. In the first step you enter your email address and the title of your blog. After that you don’t have to do anything, the system will try to connect to your database and put some default data into the database automaticly. The second step will also produce a password for you to access your blog administration page, you have to change this password latter in the administration page. That’s all!! you can see your blog by open the page in our example http://www.myblog.com that means your blog page is always the root directory of your installation.

If you open the http://www.myblog.com/wp-admin/ you will enter the administration page, of course you need to type in your username and password. The firstpage called Dashboard, other sections that you need to know in the first place are:

1. Write: to write a post or page
2. Manage: an overview of all posts, create new category (what you see on the left hand side of my blog), approve comments
3. Links: create links category as you see on my right sidebar of my blog
4. Presentation: change theme or the look and feel or your blog

Happy?? sure you are but hmm it doesn’t look like a Siemens page, since it is an internal Siemens blog maybe you want to have the same look and feel, use the colors defined by the web guidelines, use the layout and grid system that Siemens has. Well no problem, as you can see that my internal workplace blog has the same layout structure and grid system like the most of the Siemens pages, but the code is different and i’m glad for that. After the installation you adopt automaticly the default design of WordPress, but you can change it by creating your own theme or design. For that you need design skills of course, know-how of the WordPress template anatomy and some good know-how of XHTML and PHP. On how to create your own theme, i’ll write another post latter. For now you are probably already exicited to write your first post. Happy blogging.