also spracht martad

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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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?

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…