As adventurers and survivalists, we have trekked into the deepest jungle, cross the widest rivers and braved the nastiest wildlife. Going boldly where no man has gone before is somewhat our forte.
Yet, taking a step into e-wilderness had us scrambling for cover.
When someone first suggested that we start blogging to showcase our point of view in regards to Malaysian countryside, we figured it was a great idea. Back in early 2000s’, the cost of design, hosting and running a website was between RM2000-5000 a pop. It was an exorbitant fee to pay for small NGOs like us. Then something wonderful happened. Bored people in the virtual world started uploading their personal musings over the web and soon caught the attention of search engines and software aficionados. And boom, by 2006, the blogging and network sharing genre spread to Malaysian soil like wild fire and had every one muttering Myspace, Facebook, Blogspot, WordPress and Joomla like staple food in the table.
(be patient, we are coming to the “how-to wordpress” part soon)
The blogging culture took another quantum leap when the March 8th, 2008 general election saw a fistful of politicians canvassed for votes over the blogger community and won. Suddenly, a whole new world was opened up – one that is plainly worded, in your face and zero cost maintenance.
After years of doing our own thing and depending on word of mouth for spreading goodwill, internet audience that comes with no cost attached was heaven sent. And so, we took the plunge into WordPress in early 2007, mainly because it was a good platform for blogs with serious content. We didn’t like Blogspot because it allowed pornography and dubious “get rich quick” schemes to be hosted.
Our old blog at wordpress.com
After a year of cranking our malaysiaupclose.wordpress.com blog, the downside revealed itself gradually. Like everything that comes free in life – there’s a catch. Google Ads started appearing next to our posts, including some unsavoury ones. Then links to other blogs were thrown in haphazardly, some which has nothing to do with our posts and our principles. This gave our viewers the impression that we supported or recommended the links. Of course, there’s a way out. WordPress offers to make one’s blog ads-free for a small fee (!). OK, we understand somebody has to pay and we are grateful to people in WordPress who made it so easy to start something out of nothing.
But it was time to move on.
By mid-2008, we realized there was a distinct difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. After a bout of reading-ups and forum scanning, we figured org was the way to go since we wanted blogging to be a long term flick.
From the start, we had given up on posting questions in the WordPress.org forum. See, the forum is populated by HTML techies and gurus who have very low tolerance for layman questions. A question like “How do I load themes into my dashboard?” is read as an insult to their intelligence. Newbies always get fried. Help offers from forumers also poured in – with a fee, of course. We suspect no one want to tell the full story because that would topple their own rice bowl, so to speak. On the flip side, there are some great forumers who are willing to get down and dirty their hands for you. You need some luck though.
Below is what we have learnt from the rutted journey of self-hosting with WordPress.org as platform.
Please remember that every blog caters to a special segment of demographic and subject. There is no “one size fits all” when it comes to step-by-step procedures. For most of the time, one needs to surf around the internet to grasp jargons and what are they. However, we will attempt to make your adventure as painless as possible.
Moving from WordPress.COM to WordPress.ORG
Contrary to what most say, the shift was anything but “a click” as advertised. We think “countless clicks” should be the cliché.
Here is the sequence of stuffs that we are going to cover ….
1. Buying a domain name
2. Getting a webhoster
3. Uploading wordpress.org
4. Getting to know FTP
5. Plugin and Themes
6. Taking off
This article assumes that you are a seasoned WordPress.COM user and know how to navigate the standard Dashboard. Otherwise, what follows is gibberish to you. If you are not a WordPress.com user, start now. You can only run after learning how to walk – and hey, it’s free.
Buying a domain name
Armed with a valid credit card, browse around to get the best bargain for domain name registrar. We ended up with GoDaddy.Com because we were too lazy to sieve the internet and mostly because they accepted Malaysian credit card in a jiffy, no question asked (credit cards from our country has long been earmarked for fraud, guess it’s good again nowadays).
The site will ask you to input your chosen domain name and in seconds will tell you whether the name is available. You are told to key in your payment details and an email will be directed to your account to list out the important details of the payment transaction and domain name account.
Cost incurred: USD15 (RM52.50)
Important Note: Remember or write down your given Customer Ref No and email address that you keyed in. You’ll need them for renewals. Also, come back to domain registrar website to set “name servers” once you have gotten an account with a webhoster.
Getting a webhoster
Again, we were too lazy to go hobnobbing around the cyberspace and opted for Bluehost.com because firstly WordPress.org recommended them. Secondly, the “One Click Auto Install WordPress” sales pitch was too enticing for bumbling oafs like us who know nuts about HTML or CSS.
And so, our credit card was sprained again for the 24 months package that comes with unlimited disk storage and unlimited monthly data transfer. We found out later there are local webhosters that offer cheaper rates but knowing most of our viewers are from outside Malaysia, it was best to have our database hosted by US-based companies for fast uploads. Also, after reading heaps from local Lowyat.com forumers’ comments, we summarized that many local webhosters are rogue enterprises which bait customers on low pricing but do very little on support and reducing down time. Some forumers openly hard selling webhosting companies by featuring them as signatures. It didn’t look ethical to us.
After filling up details needed and making credit card payment via Bluehost.com’s portal, we were introduced to this Control Panel (Cpanel) ……
Help.
As beginner, the Cpanel looked like a huge toolbox with too many tools. We were so busted thinking about how we are going to learn up and use each and every one of them it gave us daytime nightmares. We switched off the PC and call it a day. Setting up domain name and webhosting was too much for one day.
Cost incurred: USD169 (RM592)
Important Note: It’s impossible to remember. Write down somewhere details given to you by webhoster namely “FTP address”, “IP number”, “name servers”, “database name”, “user name” and “password”. Go back to domain registrar’s website, log in and input “name servers” in the appropriate entry. A “name servers” is an unique address – Bluehost’s look like this “NS1.BLUEHOST.COM” – assigned to each webhosting company. This will tell domain registrar to direct all traffic to the webhoster when your domain name is searched.
Uploading WordPress.org
It took us 1 week to recover from e-daze and muster enough juice to switch on the PC again.
Again, our lack of IT common sense took us on a wild roller coaster ride. Firstly, when people say using WordPress.org platform we thought it was about downloading the free WordPress.org software into our PC (dumb assumption no.1). After downloading WordPress.org, what do we do ? We know how to write posts, load images but how do we interface or upload into webhoster ? In Malaysia, we slap our forehead and say “alamak” for moment like this. So, our adventure took us deeper.
Apparently, the “One Click Auto Install WordPress” was a real deal afterall. After sieving through WordPress codex and forum comments, we squinted hard, found the Fantastico icon in the Cpanel and clicked on it. It asked for database name, username, password (think of a simple ones) and quickly downloaded the WordPress.org software INTO OUR WEBHOSTING DIRECTORY …. and all this while we thought the software has to be run remote from our PC ! Bah.
OK, with that mess sorted out, next, you need to tweak the file “wp-config-sample.php”, located in “public_html” root directory. Open the file with any HTML Editor software (lucky for us Bluehost Cpanel has one handy) and this gibberish will greet you ….
<?php
// ** MySQL settings ** //
define('DB_NAME', 'putyourdbnamehere'); // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'usernamehere'); // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'yourpasswordhere'); // …and password
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost'); // 99% chance you won't need to change this value
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
define('DB_COLLATE', '');
Remember the username, password and database name you created earlier? Well, replace them in the script and save the file as “wp-config.php”. Now, you are all set to go. Type this into your internet browser “http://yourdomainname/wp-admin” and the below will pop up ….
Key in username and password, as saved in the “wp-config.php” file, and the WordPress dashboard will find its way to your screen. Go ahead, work your magic by posting some trial images and words. It should work fine by now. For a start, the dashboard only dishes out 2 themes and 1-2 plugins. For more, that’s where the fun begins.
Getting to know FTP
Don’t let the word FTP cow you. It’s only a geek speak for File Transfer Protocol, a program that whizzes files across cyberspace between your PC and webhoster, seamlessly and safely. Again, we were glad Bluehost has one ready called “FTP Unlimited” that we can start using. If your webhoster doesn’t have an FTP program rigged in, you can download one from FileZilla.
Some FTP programs use Java. You may have to download the program from Sun Microsystem’s website into your PC before the FTP program can work.
This is how FTP works. It emulates Window Explorer. You can move, copy, paste, rename … just about anything the Window Explorer does with files in your PC. When you launch FTP program from your PC, you need tell it the “FTP Address” or “IP number” of your webhoster so that it knows where to interface with. If you launch it from webhoster, in our case Bluehost, the “FTP Address” is automatically set up by default. Done correctly, your PC screen will display this …..
On left column are files from your PC. One right column are files from your webhoster’s directory. You will see buttons that help you with functions like copy, paste, rename, upload and download. All FTP programs look the same (wow, we are starting to sound like pros). What you really want to learn is how to upload files from your PC to webhoster directory.
In geek speak, “upload” means transferring files from your PC to webhoster and vice versa for “download”. We messed up on this in the beginning.
Plugins and Themes
Let’s say you like a particular theme offered in WordPress.org Theme List. Download it into your PC and unzip or extract the file into a chosen directory. Piece of cake.
Launch your FTP program in PC, or in our case, go to Bluehost and click on the “FTP Unlimited” icon. The program will analyse and display the usual left-right column. Click the theme file on the left PC side and click the webhoster directory under “wp-content”. Another directory will pop up. See the “themes” directory, click and highlight it. Click “upload” button on your FTP program.
Once a particular theme file has be uploaded into the webhoster’s “themes” directory, you will see it included as part of WordPress dashboard’s theme selection the next time you log in. The same method should be adhered for any themes or plugins that you fancy.
Yay. You have learned how to assessorise and dress your baby, pat yourself on the back.
Taking off
Venturing into the world of WordPress.org blogging is like growing up. Now, you have to fend for yourself. There’s no one to protect you from spams, hackers and dubious comments. No automatic plugins, themes and useful widgets. You have to start from ground zero.
Of course, some say you can import old posts from WordPress.com into your new WordPress.org site but we rather not. We heard imported posts will break up and corrupt the new site with html codes which search engine crawlers have difficulty in deciphering. For our new WordPress.org side, we build it from scratch again.
Also, do not expect your new blog to garner as many hits as your old blog. Search engines’ crawlers take time to index and there are thousands of new blogs churned out everyday. As best, before any crawler makes a visit, work on making your content interesting to viewers. Read, rewrite, improve, do just about anything to accentuate your specialty. And when crawlers finally step in, the robots will do their parts in making sure your masterpieces are showcased to the world.
Happy blogging !
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Before you forget, we are rainforest naturalists. Not IT techies. As far as cyberspace is concerned, it’s a jungle out there for us. So, if you encounter any blog bloopers, we are not people you should consult. A good place to poke your nose into is Codex WordPress
@import url(http://www.google.com/cse/api/branding.css);
Now here’s the twist
Crafted by people and time
One would note that many Peranakan Cina prefer to live in shop houses, where business is done at ground floor and home is on the first floor. Wooden windows with ventilation fins became the hallmark of these shop houses.
The sword called in to protect dwellers in 1966 has unwittingly protected the Straits Houses instead for half a century and, ironically, withdrawing the sword was just as bad.
