Saturday, December 27, 2008

How to make a WordPress Powered Blog

Since past 24 hours I’d been working towards setting up my own domain based Word Press Powered blog and in the process have learnt  a lot about PHP and Word Press settings.

This How to will show how to setup a blog easily and effectively and not make the mistakes I’d made on the way , trust me a single” ‘ “  can make a hell lot of a difference and can take hours for a novice like me to fix .

The first step towards setting up the blog wa finding a domain , It was one hectic procedure , much or less like naming your first born , It has to be perfect and easy to remember and did I mention Unique .

I tried around a hundred names and variations and they all were taken from Twine to Tween , Opolis to Techfool all were gone and then one of my business associates handed me his card with their corporate slogan “ Intelligence Applied”  written on it ( Note : already taken ) and then it hit me Sense Appplied  is what I need and fortunately it was not taken as per whois.net

Second step was finding a hosting provider , I looked into a number of them as recommended by my friends such a Bluehost , Inspedium etc but finalized on GoDaddy , i’d been using them before and found them to be good and inexpensive . So i got their Deluxe Windows plan .  On a side note I took Windows becasue of my preference , Linux plans are also available at the same cost and there is no difference . 

Now I’ve have to setup a blog , on 25th Dec morning , I bought the domain and in a few hours got the page setup . GoDaddy offers one click WordPress installation through their applications program for free so i utilized that and in another couple of hours my WP database was functional .

Now comes the difficult part setting up the blog .  I’ve had no prior experience of programming , I use software but I don’t write or modify them so making a custom CSS based WP theme was totally out of question so I went with the premade themes available through WP and other sources .

I installed around 8 themes before deciding on the one I want .  A theme may look good on the preview but when used may not suit your needs , the same happened to me . The theme I wanted was pleasing to the eye but when I installed it and wrote a dummy post it was totally opposite to my needs so after a little research I managed to get another Theme which met my requirements .

Once installed , this theme had four blocks in the right side for ad , but no codes for Adsense . As I mentioned I’m not a programmer but to make the site work I installed  Dreamweaver Cs4 trial and started going through code , sense is required , all programming is like normal english , I searched for keyword adsense in all the PHP files to see which one has it  , finally one of the theme I got was supporting Adsense and after a little probing around I found the method to incorporate Adsense to my theme . 

<!--Begin 125x125 Ad Block-->
<div class="adwrap">
<a href="<?php echo $artsee_banner_url_one; ?>"><img src="<?php echo $artsee_banner_image_one; ?>" style="border: none;" alt="advertisement" /></a>
<a href="<?php echo $artsee_banner_url_two; ?>"><img src="<?php echo $artsee_banner_image_two; ?>" style="border: none;" alt="advertisement" /></a>
<a href="<?php echo $artsee_banner_url_three; ?>"><img src="<?php echo $artsee_banner_image_three; ?>" style="border: none;" alt="advertisement" /></a>
<a href="<?php echo $artsee_banner_url_four; ?>"><img src="<?php echo $artsee_banner_image_four; ?>" style="border: none;" alt="advertisement" /></a>
</div>
<!--End 125x125 Ad Block—>

Was the actual code on Sidebar setup and I had to change it to

<!--Begin 125x125 Ad Block-->
<div class="adwrap">
<a href="<?php echo $artsee_banner_url_one; ?>"><?php include 'adsense/onead.php';?> </a>
</div>
<!--End 125x125 Ad Block—>

i also had to make an Adsense Folder in the root of Theme and incorporate a PHP file containing Adsense Code generated by Google .

All setup after 24 hours I’m ready to run the blog , I’ve started the test run and hopefully on the 1st of Jan 2009  the world will see

www.senseapplied.com

as the new destination to their ‘ making sense of the world around them “ fix .

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