I’ve been kicking around the idea of setting up a blog for a few weeks now. Revising my resume and writing a cover letter, oddly enough, put me back into the mood to write again–it’s been a while.

Since then, I’ve been writing voluminous emails, especially at work, which I’m sure that my co-workers have really appreciated. Since my last client decided I wasn’t “working out,” I’ve had some time on my hands. I’ve studied the new JDK 1.5 beta, learned how to use almost all the new and cool features, updated Cardinal’s training materials to reflect that, and found a little time to research PHP-based blogs.

(Why PHP? Why not Perl? I have to admit an affection for PHP, and it’s a little easier for me to tweak than Perl.)

Downloading WordPress was straightforward: I dropped it into /usr/local/src/ on the webserver, unpacked it, moved the unpacked directory to the blog/ directory under the host’s directory, and changed ownership. I couldn’t, however, convince Apache to write a configuration file without changing permissions on the whole blog directory, so I worked on the configuration file by hand. There was really nothing to it: just set the database parameters. I then logged into MySQL and set up the user.

Now, usually when I would add users to MySQL, I would add them by hand to the administration tables, and would have to remember to COMMIT and FLUSH PRIVILEGES. MySQL, however, has added a lot of new flags and I figured it might just be faster to use GRANT. It was, though I had to add the user again: once for the localhost, once for the actual hostname. Through trial and error (and creating a simple PHP script that attempted to connect to MySQL and reported all the errors), I figured out that I couldn’t just use the IP address or ‘localhost’, but had to go all the way to specifying the server name.

Obviously, I eventually got it working.

So far, WordPress is impressive. It has all the features I’m really interested in and is a much better product than I would have come up with on my own. It has a nice user interface (if a little “light” for use with the laptop) and had default settings that were attractive, albeit my wife might have different ideas about that. While some options are non-obvious to a blogging n00b like myself, I figured them out from the context pretty easily.

So, now that I’ve got my blog, it’s time to spend a little more time writing and reading, especially other people’s blogs, and give myself a place that I can collect my thoughts. And, maybe with time, get involved in a blogging community.