For years I have wanted to set up a website, but was always daunted by the minutiae of getting hosting and controlling the site. I tried a free service (Tripod) for a while, but was really disappointed by the speed, the crude level of access I had, and the ads liberally slathered onto every page served.
Long ago I’d secured the wigdahl.org domain. I set up mail forwarding to my Comcast account, but that was about it. I had wanted the wigdahl.net or wigdahl.com domains, but both were taken. wigdahl.com is taken by James Wigdahl, a distant relative and West Coast software developer; he’s had it for years and has an extensive Web presence there, so I knew that one was off the table. Wigdahl.net seemed to be in limbo, never used for anything. I checked in every now and then to see whether it had freed up or been used, and watched as the time to expiry ticked away.
Finally, the domain expired. Unfortunately, the registrar held onto it for quite a while. They offered it to me for $60, but I knew that if they released it I could get it through Namecheap for $8.88, so I just stood pat. Finally the original registrar released it, and I snapped it up.
It seemed criminal to leave a nice .net domain blank and only used for email forwarding, so I started researching hosting options and web software packages. Robin wanted a website on which she could host digital photos in a nice album format, so I was looking for a web host that offered a lot of space cheaply.
When I started looking I discovered that Namecheap now supports dynamic DNS, which would make it possible for me to host my website on my own hardware. This looked much more interesting than using a remote hosting service. The more I looked the more I began to realize that with the sheer number of open-source software packages available today it would be quite easy to host my own server. I’ve got a secondary computer that doesn’t get used for much other than web browsing and occasional Office use, so I started looking at specific software packages.
Selection of a web server was pretty easy — Apache is almost a no-brainer. I downloaded Apache 2 for Windows and quickly got it installed and configured for basic operation.
After looking around for good blog software, I settled on WordPress, a well-regarded package. This software required MySQL and PHP to operate, so I started downloading.
Installing MySQL was extremely simple, and PHP was quite easy as well. I had to do a bit of documentation scanning to figure out how to run PHP as an Apache module and how to configure PHP to be able to communicate with MySQL, but I figured it out pretty quickly. I then installed WordPress, configured it, and started installation.
Unfortunately, it came up with a blank screen.
Luckily, I found a great tutorial on the Web with detailed instructions on how to configure Apache, PHP, MySQL, phpMyAdmin and WordPress. I downloaded and installed phpMyAdmin, which allows browser-based administration of MySQL installations. Using phpMyAdmin, I was able to set up the proper accounts to allow the WordPress installation to configure a database in MySQL using PHP. Finally, the configuration was complete.
All of this software is open-source and all of it works very well. Despite some relatively poor documentation in some areas, I was able to get the blog up and running in no more than 3 hours total, starting from a naked Windows XP box, for absolutely zero cost. I would highly recommend this approach to anyone that wants to experiment with Internet and web technologies.
Next on the agenda — learning modern web design and SWiSHMax!
***
2009 update: I’m still using WordPress, but I’m up to the 2.7 version now and am using the Arclite theme. Still getting my feet wet with the details of implementation now that 4 years have passed…