associate a name with your webspace, e.g. somesubdomain.dreamhosters.com for free or somedomain.com if it’s available (at Dreamhost, one domain name registration is included in your account)
Install WordPress in your webspace
use Dreamhost’s one-click install process (under Goodies > One-Click Installs) to install WordPress in a subdirectory called wordpress (takes care of the tedious database creation and configuration)
(otherwise, follow these instructions to install WordPress manually)
visit http://somedomain.com/wordpress/ and run through WordPress’s simple web-based install process
login with the admin user and change password under Users
create a new user for yourself under Authors & Users
give your new user administrator privileges
choose a theme
follow these instructions for making the homepage of your blog show up at http://somedomain.com/ instead of http://somedomain.com/wordpress/
I’ve often contemplated starting a daily photo blog (I may still), but as it turns out, I may not need to. This year I posted to my blog 195 times (not counting neatlinks), and included over 369 photos and screenshots in those posts.
While thinking about novel ways to express the year in a single post, it occurred to me that it’d be awesome to see ALL the images I’ve posted at once—as a kind of year-end visual zeitgeist. Inspired by Kenny Weng’s summary of moodaholic, I wrote a script to extract and resize each image—with links to the posts they came from! Ah, the memories.
I compiled a list of the least popular posts I’ve written in the last year, and not surprisingly, 8 out of 10 were from November and December, not having had enough time to gestate in the belly of Google.
So I decided to correct for that by grabbing the least popular post from each month of the year.
January:On Inspiration (51) A vehicle to post a quote I liked from the Bob Moog documentary.
March:Katie in California (67) Brief announcement that my sister had arrived, including a picture of the bay bridge traffic we sat in.
April:Marking up blog post updates semantically (33) I like this post, I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten greater traction. I still think people should use and style the <ins> tag more often.
It’s interesting that even my least popular posts have gotten upwards of 30-80 views while just hanging out on the internet for a year.
Several are just photos (some from my cameraphone), which suggests I shouldn’t start a moblog any time soon. Funny that my post on how to Get photos off your cell phone without paying Sprint $15 a month is one the most popular of the year with over 12,000 views.
In May, I added the ability to put a PayPal donation button at the bottom of my posts, partly because of an email I got from someone who wasn’t willing to pay for a custom WordPress plugin, but said that if I created it nonetheless:
I bet you’d get some donations. (I always donate for the plugins I use, but maybe I’m the only one?)
I’ve never had the intention of transforming my personal blog into a source of income. My blog’s most important audience are my friends and family, who happen to be the people whose sensibilities I’d worry the most about offending by appearing to ask for money.
However, Google and other search engines have developed a keen interest in several of my posts, sending hundreds of strangers my way every day, especially to those posts which seem to answer peoples’ burning technical questions or provide some blogging functionality in the form of a plugin.
In order to walk that line, I decided that the donation button should only show up on a few of the posts (ones that I’ve categorized as worthy of the “Tip Jar” treatment), so you’ll never see them in the feed or on the homepage. As a nod to my most valued readers, the button will only appear a week after the post was published.
