also spracht martad

Overheard and saved, because it’s not every day one comes across such beauties:

Alas, all opinions do not have the same value. There are those that are given and those that are given with historical references. There are those that are simply believed and those that are not, despite any support provided.

Right. Of course. Silly me for not seeing the light earlier, so thank you for illuminating my path: I truly thought that, a bit like gustibus, opinions were not disputandis. So I stand corrected, until further notice —from you or, even better, from someone who has a more historically referenced opinion to validate or refute this current opinion.

Oh, and by the by. Did you say which class of opinions does your opinion belong to?

Weblogs are intrinsically subject to spamming and other security breaches, due to their own participated nature. Some degree of protection is provided within the default WordPress installation —but the way the Internet is going, the protecting “walls” need to be much thicker than that, or spammers are guaranteed to attack your new WordPress blog within hours from making it publicly available on the Web.

Securing and fine-tuning your WordPress installation requires acting on three separate and complementary aspects: administrative access, spam protection measures and directory permissions. Administrative access rules and (some degree of) spam protection measures are offered by WordPress in your blog’s Site Admin interface, whereas permissions are accessed through FTP, Telnet/SSH or pair.com’s ACC.

I describe here how you can improve security on the test blog we have just finished installing, and suggest that you follow the same procedure after installing every new blog you want to set up.
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OK, we are nearly there. Actually, we might have taken the long and winding road to get to this point… but from where we are to having your first test blog up and running, it is now a matter of seconds!

Virtually all you need is in place, and WordPress can now be installed by simply opening Safari and typing in the following URI in the Location field:
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Once you have set up and organised local and remote directories, you can now create and store the WordPress configuration file for the first test blog, which, in the example I am using for this tutorial, is called martad7 and will be installed at

This is how you set up the configuration file:

A.    Locate your local copy of the wp-config-sample.php file, which is inside your local wordpress directory.
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It is a horribly gloomy day in this Sunny [Gateway-to-Heaven] location in between NSW’s [Million-Dollar-Views] Central Coast and [Fantastic-Lifestyle] Mid-North Coast. One of us wants to start painting the living room and needs help taking the heavy curtains down. I help, but the job is heavier than both of us expected. We struggle and laugh. And James comments:

It is either a fool or a wise person who can laugh in the face of such adversities.

‘Who said it?’, I ask. He can’t remember, so I guess we can quote him for that - for now, at least.

After transferring the WP tar.gz file to the correct directory on your Web server, the archive needs to be uncompressed to extract the program (WordPress).

If you have followed my instructions at Step 6, your WordPress compressed archive will be located at /usr/WWW/users/replaceusername/sboxcrnr/wordpress-2.1.3.tar.gz.

Decompressing the archive requires that you access your Web server through Telnet or SSH, where you can issue commands to interact with your remote directories and files. Both Telnet and SSH are available through Mac OS X’s Terminal utility. To decompress the wordpress-2.1.3.tar.gz archive and extract the WordPress program,
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In Step 2: Drafting an installation plan, you would have noted down the Web address (URI) you want your first blog to have. This first blog is the one you’ll be using to perform your first WP installation with this tutorial, and also to get familiar with the way WordPress blogs are managed and used.

Your sample test blog can be anywhere you like on the virtual Web server pair.com provides for your account. For the sake of this exercise, I will make references to the test blog I set up to test this tutorial, and leave it to you to edit as needed the details for your test blog, its URI and location.
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Before attempting to install your first blog, you must activate and set up the MySQL database that will hold the data, i.e. the actual contents of all your blogs. This is simply done on pair.com through the ACC (Account Control Center) [ 1 ]:

A.    Login to the ACC.

B.    In the Main Menu, choose Advanced Features, then Database Administration.
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This Step is sometimes referred to as “Downloading the source code”. Now because I’m no computer geek-wiz (and never had any aspiration to becoming a programmer, as previously stated), anything called or referred to as “source code” makes me fear I might have ended up in the wrong place.

So please pretend you’ve never heard of this “source code” bit, and just follow these simple instructions for obtaining a copy of the WordPress program:

A.    Use Safari to go to the WordPress download page.
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Because I am describing the installation procedure for getting multiple WP blogs up and running on a remote host, the following requirements need to be ascertained for your Web host, not your local computer. (It is of course possible to install WordPress locally, that is, on your own computer - however, this is a completely different scenario, and I’ll be adding instructions on how to install WP on Mac OSX Panther and Tiger in some future article….. not here!)

For WordPress (up to version 2.1.3) to run smoothly on your hosted Web servers,

A.    Your host must provide the following:
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I think the reason why my first attempts at installing WP did not succeed, was that I did not take the time to stop and think long enough to lay down a decent installation plan. So before moving on, I suggest that you take the time to identify the following elements and make notes that will help you through the installation process:

A.    Expected number of blog users

B.    Expected number of blogs per user

C.    Domain mapping and URI of blogs
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Identifying one’s requirements can greatly help in choosing the right solution. Before moving on, I believe it’s worth for you to compare your requirements and expectations with mine. The next steps will obviously make more sense, the more similar our situations are.

Requirement #1

I maintain a number of personal and business Websites. Some of our clients and ourselves wanted a way to make topical or time-sensitive information available on the Web, without having to meet any of the following conditions:

1. having to depend on myself (as the Webmaster) to create a new or update an existing Website, or
2. having to learn HTML, FTP, nor any other basic Web publishing skills.

Requirement No. 1 is therefore that final users do not need to have any knowledge of Web design, HTML, file transfer procedures, server access etc.
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(best experienced with an account on pair.com and an Apple computer running Mac OS X)

OK, so you’ve heard of how wonderful it is to have a blog, and now you want to install WordPress. I know how it feels. I’ve had exactly the same thought several times in the past - at least three times, I’d say, starting with WP version 1.2-mingus or thereabouts.

On the surface, WordPress sounded very easy and very convincing right from the beginning - but I must be a real dodo, because I had to go through the constantly growing online documentation, the Codex, the forums, the linked tutorials, more tutorials I came across by accident, etc., many many times before things started to click and make some real sense for me. I guess there was just too much for my old head to get round it quickly - so for a couple of times at least, I got where I thought I was really close to having my blogs going… but had instead to surrender to their not being working, and give up.
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I like this idea of changing layout and general look-and-feel of my blogs, so I spent some time browsing the Codex and other popular WordPress links in search of a new “dress”.

There are many many interesting themes out there. However, none is exactly the way I’d like, so I am starting to do some research on what can be customised. If I was a programmer and knew php, my task would be easier of course. As a somewhat dumb Webmaster, I can rely on my familiarity with CSS and HTML to start from the easy end, which is the style.css file that goes with my current chosen theme (WP Classic).

Seems to me however there could be some more customisation that could be done, and explained even to non-programmers. Maybe an idea for another series of tutorials?

In the Western world, homeopathy was the first alternative therapy to challenge conventional medicine. Aromatherapy and Bach flower remedies followed within too long… and then there was the deluge.

I find it fascinating to browse through the lists of natural, alternative and complementary practices that challenge conventional allopathic medicine.

I find it even more fascinating how so many people seem to believe that the holistic approach, or traditional medicine as some like to call it, will solve all of their problems. It’s like we cannot put up with the idea of not being perfect machines, so when some part of our psycho-physiological mechanism stops working, we must find a remedy that brings it back to (supposed) perfection again.
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I lost the attribution, but I suspect the following comes from Brad King and John Borland’s book, just like the previous quote about video games:

If developers push the envelope too far, then they make it tempting for politicians to jump on an absolutely no-lose issue.

If I remember correctly, this was reported by King and Borland among the comments posted on some video game community board after the Columbine shooting.

While tidying up my desk today, I came across a quote I had noted down a few years ago, while translating into Italian Dungeons & Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture From Geek to Chic, by Brad King and John Borland.
Here is a [slightly edited] version:

I’ve been playing video games all my life and NEVER ONCE has it affected me. Maybe you were affected cause you’ve got your head stuck up your [BEEP]. By the way, bash Vice City or any other game one more time and I’m gonna come down to your wacko office and shove that biased report card so far down your throat you’ll be [BEEP] corrupt soccer moms until next Christmas.

So what do you think. Do video games make people happier?

According to the commonly available instructions, installing WordPress is a matter of five minutes. I have found this to be not exactly true, and had in fact to go through a lot of troubles and tribulations before reaching the point, today, where some sort of blog could be made available on the Web.

After investing a significative number of hours in research and experiments, I am beginning to get a good grasp on the intricacies of choosing and installing some kind of blogging software. So as time allows, I will be publishing here a series of tutorials, which I hope will help people like me (i.e., non-programmers) install a Weblog application on your Website.

Because WordPress is the first blog I have attempted to install, I will of course start from my own version of the (in)famous WordPress 5-minute install.

The first tutorial I am working on is called:

The famous WordPress 5-minute installation revisited, aka Grandma’s No-Fail WP Multiple Blog Installation Tutorial

More to come…