The start of a WordPress
The other day I was trying to find a new @gmail.com email account. I’m sick and tired of explaining to people what “wmasterme” means: everyone is a little pervert! In my search for a new name I found that daniel.slaughter, dan.slaughter, danielslaughter, d.slaughter, dslaughter, and of course slaughter was unavailable. I was appalled at my findings and discouraged that I was no longer a unique individual. So, I thought to myself, what if danielslaughter.com was taken? I quickly whois-ed the site, noticing it wasn’t registered I took it into my arms.
And then I was thinking about creating a wiki-like site where users could post comments on the pages I created. But… why? Why not just use this fantastic, already created, little application called WordPress? I had never installed it before so I set out to do so.
WordPress’ website proposed it would take me 5 minutes to install it on my server. I assumed not, but went ahead with it anyways. The following are the steps and encounters I had when installing WordPress:
1. Download and unzip the WordPress package:
This step wasn’t too bad, I’m on dialup and the files are compressed, so this 622KB file took about two minutes.
2. Create a database for WordPress on your web server with a MySQL user:
Again, an easy step… I had previously today done this for one of my classes to host a PDA Bank Application, so I knew exactly where to go in my host’s admin. This step took another two minutes.
3. Rename the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php:
I think that took less time than writing out this sentence.
4. Open wp-config.php and fill in your database details:
Less than 30 seconds to complete this step. Good, so we’re maybe 4.5 minutes into this 5 minute process.
5. Upload wordpress to your web server:
Uh oh… Let’s just say dialup sucks. I dragged and dropped the files onto my web server, brushed my teeth, went pee, and still had time to watch the 8 minute file transfer complete. We have obviously now exceeded our 5 minutes by 7.5 minutes.
6. Run the WordPress installation script on your server.
Two steps, and I pretty much just hit next, this took maybe 30 seconds if I wasn’t picky.
And we’re done! As you can see, if I was not on dialup WordPress would not have taken 12 minutes to install. Perhaps WordPress should have a disclaimer that their proposed speeds are based on your internet connection. Oh well, 12 minutes isn’t bad.
Until next time,
Daniel Slaughter
Add comment December 1st, 2006