It’s Live! – Setting Up a WordPress Blog

skoral    Wordpress Tutorials     how to's, WordPress

I have been trying to figure out a good way to make my notes for WordPress site building accessible anywhere I’m at. Sure, Evernote works great, but why keep all that good information to myself? I decided to share it with the world. What better way than on a WordPress site?

I built the site from the ground up in a little under an hour with three initial posts completed. For you who are interested in the nuts and bolts, I run WordPress 3.3.1 on a very small RackSpace Cloud Server (256MB RAM, 10GB HDD, 100mbps Uplink, Cloud redundancy)

These are (and will be) mostly my notes that I have saved through out my time as a Web Developer, and many of the notes were created while I was making the “Sunset at the Zoo” site.

Go to Setting up a WordPress Blog now.

Setting Up a WordPress Blog

Lighttpd – WordPress URL Rewrite Rules

skoral    Wordpress Tutorials     lighttpd, mod_rewrite, pretty links, WordPress

How to get rid of “index.php” from your WordPress URLs

I had an interesting situation while I was building another WordPress site on a low memory VPS. The Virtual Private Server had only 192MB of ram, so in order to maximize resources, I used Lighttpd rather than Apache. I also optimized MySQL for the same reason.

The interesting thing was that I was seeing “index.php” thrown into my URL structure. So instead of seeing something like http://sonkoral.com/post-title-here, I was getting http://sonkoral.com/index.php/post-title-here.

Although it really doesn’t harm the way the site works, I really wanted a “pretty url” structure for the site.

WordPress, I found out does not supply the rewrite rules for Lighttpd as it does for Apache and Apache2, so you have some extra configuration to accomplish the same thing.

First, enter the lighttpd folder and create the /etc/lighthttpd/wpmu-rewrite.conf file required.

# cd /etc/lighttpd

# touch /etc/lighttpd/wpmu-rewrite.conf

# nano /etc/lighthttpd/wpmu-rewrite.conf

Paste this into the file:

server.error-handler-404 = “/index.php”
url.rewrite-once = (
“^/(.*/)?files/$” => “/index.php”,
“^/(.*/)?files/(.*)” => “/wp-content/blogs.php?file=$2?,
“^(/wp-admin/.*)” => “$1?,
“^/([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(wp-.*)” => “/$2?,
“^/([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(.*\.php)$” => “/$2?,
)

Save the file by entering in sequence: ctrl-x, Y, enter key.

Now, edit /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf, by placing the following at the end of the file. Note to change “domain\.com and domain.com to your domain name.

# nano /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

$HTTP["host"] =~ “domain\.com” {
simple-vhost.default-host = “domain.com”
include “wpmu-rewrite.conf”
}

Save the file by entering in sequence: ctrl-x, Y, enter key.

Finally you have to copy /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/10-fastcgi.conf to /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled and restart lighttpd.

# cp /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/10-fastcgi.conf /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled

# /etc/init.d/lighttpd restart

At this point, go to the wordpress dashboard, to settings, permalinks and choose custom. if /index.php shows up in the text field, remove it: /index.php/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ to /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/.

That’s it! You now have pretty URLs for your WordPress website on a Cheap VPS running Lighttpd and MySql!

Cheers!

2012 WordPress Blog Ping List

skoral    Wordpress Tutorials    

Just saving a ping list for blogs here. You use this in the WordPress settings > Writing, and at the bottom of the settings, there is a box for Update Services.

Ping services are essenial as it tells blog directory services when you have updated your site by “pinging” the directories.

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Building Two Niche Sites

skoral    Wordpress Tutorials     Niche Sites

So over the past week, I have set up two brand new websites surrounding my children’s interests. They are similar sites, and the setup was exactly the same for both.

ProfessorLaytonGames.tk- This site is all about the “Professor Layton” game series for the Nintendo DS/DSi/3DS gaming platform. I gave a synopsis of each game and put links to purchasable products on every page, the sidebar and footer. Within 24 hours of going public, promoting on Facebook, Twitter and related forums, I made my first sale on a Pocoyo Plush doll!

PocoyoWorld.tk – The kids love watching the short animated cartoon “Pocoyo” on YouTube. Jin and I already knew that there were a number of products out there, so it was natural for me to do the same type of website for this niche subject. As of this post, the ‘Shell’ website is running, which means that the core content management system is installed, the site theme is complete, and the home page content is done (to some extent). I will be adding the rest of the content and products over the next couple nights (as schedule allows). The site will probably be done in less than 8 hours of work at night after the rest of the family is in bed.

How do you set up a site like these?

I am running all of these “mini-sites”, if you will, on a ridiculously small 190MB virtual private server (VPS), however, you could accomplish the same thing on a shared webhosting service. I recommend BlueHost for this as they are inexpensive and the setup is painless, and a single shared account can hold over 40 sites reliably (They promote the service as unlimited, and so far, I haven’t hit any limits – total account size is over 14GB in space!) I use WordPress as the base for building all of my personal sites. It is reliable, free and works with very little coding knowledge. There is a huge support community, and it can be configured to do almost anything you want.

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Set up a FREE Low Memory VPS with WordPress installer

skoral    Wordpress Tutorials     free vps, hosting, wordpress installer

From my notes for how to set up a cheap, low memory Virtual Private Server that can run multiple instances of the WordPress blogging platform.

Why? Shared hosting is okay, but you are limited in your control over the resources on your account. Sharing a server is also sharing resources, and if someone is using their hosting account for videos, large flash or MP3 streaming, you could see a significant drop in performance. Another significant downside is not having the ability to configure the server based on the applications that you want to run.

A Virtual Private Server, or VPS gives you complete control (known as Root access) over your server. The virtual server sits on a physical server, but acts independently of the physical server, and the other VPS instances also residing on the physical box.

The following instructions show you how to set up your own WordPress blog on a low memory VPS for free. You have root access and you wont have to worry about other shared users hogging all the resources of the server. The following instructions will automatically configure the server for WordPress, and you will be able to set up multiple instances of WordPress on the server. The number of instances can vary depending on how much traffic your websites receive.

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