Where’s Lou

Earlier today a friend of mine asked if I was going to blog about how I went about setting up WordPress on GoDaddy. Turns out he doesn’t have a blog yet and was thinking of going that route. So that’s what this one’s all about! I promise it’ll be the last wordpress blog for a while. ;) They do have their own forums after all.

Now with any type of operation like this you’re going to want to start with two things first: tools and a plan. The plan only gets you a little ways of course because nothing ever ends up going the way you think it will in the beginning, and the tools clearly also only carry you so far because of the problems you can’t anticipate. But at the very least it helps you feel better about taking that first step - going from zero to one - on an endless timeline of tinkering.

So to start with the plan. I’m not saying it’s the best or that it’s for everyone, but I used GoDaddy and I’m happy with the results. I’m too cheap to rent a dedicated server and too lazy to maintain a home-based datacenter so their Deluxe hosting plan, at like a single-figure per month, with 100gb storage on a ready-to-go Linux server is right in my sweet spot.

What you get with that is a running server with apache http access to your own subdirectory and password protected ftp access to that same directory. You’re also going to need to have a dns domain name registered and pointing to the static ip address godaddy provides. I already owned dejardin.org from a while back, and I keep my dns records stored at everydns.net so in my case I just edited my dns info instead of transfering or buying a domain name from godaddy. It’s easier to just buy it from godaddy if you don’t have one yet, I’m just saying if that’s also your case it’s not a show-stopper.

So first thing first buy a Linux deluxe host and a domain name via GoDaddy. Or own a domain name then just buy the account and you can associate it with the name. Or if you already have a Windows account host doing nothing change it to Linux. You want to do that first because their systems have work queues they churn through to execute requests. They’re pretty quick, like within the hour or so, but you’ll want to get that started asap regardless.

That part just killed me.

But once that’s started you should be able to go to GoDaddy, click on the My Account on the right in the Welcome Back area, click on Hosting Account List in the Hosting & Email section, then click Open in the Control Panel column next to the domain you have. This brings you to a Hosting Manager page with a huge set of tools I came back to over and over as I was working.

The first one I needed was the DNS Manager. Like I said, my dns is in everydns, and this is where I found out what information GoDaddy would have provided. I just went to everydns and made it match. If your case as well you’ll want to do that now so the change can spread around while you’re downloading tools.

Now for the tools! First you’ll need some open source to do what you need to do. (I mentioned that part about cheap already, right?)

You’re obviously going to want the first one on the list - Firefox. And you’re also going to want the Firebug plugin. Seriously. That has some css/html debugging (in addition to the js stuff) that can’t be beat.

Next you’re going to want the ftp app lower down the page - Cyberduck. Because GoDaddy only gives you ftp access a good app that lets you drag and drop with Finder, and will bulk upload, download, and sync crosswise is vital.

While you’re there download the Democracy Player too. You’ll be glad you did. Hey! I didn’t even see Smultron before! I’ll have to check that out. I’ve been using a 30 day eval of Dreamweaver, but clearly that’s a temporary solution.

Moving on. Next you’ll need software to run. All of this stuff is going to be php, which is typically distributed as a zip containing the files and folders you’ll push to production. Something that worked well for me was to create a dejardin.org folder inside of Sites. After I unzipped the various packages in a working location I dragged the files to their proper location inside of the Sites/dejardin.org folder. Actually this blog is a subdirectory - Sites/dejardin.org/louis. All I did was renamed Wordpress folder to louis, because there’s also a Sites/dejardin.org/weaselboy installation that’s simply another renamed Wordpress folder.

Anyway! Grab the latest copy of Wordpress 2.1.2, unzip it, and put it where you’ll expect it to live in your site folder. I also downloaded the K2 theme that gets planted at Sites/dejardin.org/louis/wp-content/themes/k2. Themes in WordPress are very important because they’re not just style, they’re also structure and code. So your theme also determines how compatible you’ll be with plugins, and K2 has been a very solid foundation to my experience. It’s a righteous theme.

Then it’s time to open the ftp root in Cyberduck and very carefully drag the wordpress folder onto the root to start the upload. If you’re a plugin addict like me you’ll find this becomes a frequent ritual - though in most cases it’ll be with a subfolder rather than bulking the whole thing out each time. The things that make this a ritual for me is the voice in my head that says “Duck time!” whenever I’m ready to put something up, and how I’ll pause for a second or four when I’m dragging a folder over it’s target before I let it go. Sort of a forced visual double-check, like keeping one finger on a chess piece, because when you drop that folder, baby, it’s gone. There’s nothing worse than trying to clean-up the mess after a sloppy ftp drag and drop.

That’ll take a while. If you have Comcast and they’re feeling fussy and dropping your packets it can get pretty bad. I had a few episodes where disconnects, and a GoDaddy ftp 2 connection limit, left me with a dead Duck a few times. But just keep an eye on it. I deleted the folder if it failed badly, out of paranoia, restarted the Duck and tried again. Have I mentioned I hate Comcast? If you’re not sending voip or http packets it seems like they could care less if they see the light of day.

Moving on again. You’ve got that lined up so there are only two steps left. Creating a mysql database and running the blog for the first time. I didn’t link to mysql there because you won’t download it - godaddy has a copy running and waiting for you.

This next procedure is called the Famous 5-Minute Install and I’ve had it work for me just great like three times so far.

Back at the GoDaddy Control Panel I mentioned earlier you will find the MySQL icon - so click that bugger. On the next page click “create new database” and select for mysql 5.0. Provide a description of “wordpress” or something as well as a username and password. Be sure you don’t use the same password you use for any other purposes! This particular password is going in a plain-text config file - so I suggest you just open textedit and whack your keyboard like a three year old for a second to produce some some nice entropy and copy that. You don’t have to remember it because before you click Continue on the mysql form we’ll be jumping back to the wordpress folder located in Sites to put that information in the wordpress configuration file.

In my case I did that by opening Sites/dejardin.org/louis/wp-config-sample.php in a text editor, going Save As to call it wp-config.php. Now to fill in wp-config.php correctly is pretty easy if you know what godaddy’s form is going to do. The DB_NAME and DB_USER will both be the same - they’re both the User Name in the form. The DB_PASSWORD will match what will be pasted into password on the form. However there’s a note in there that it’s a 99% chance you can leave the DB_HOST ‘localhost’. Nope. This is the 1% case.

But anyway once you have the password, name, etc. in wp-config.php and on the form click go ahead and create Continue. The creation is scheduled and I waited for a bit, but after a few moments I could click on the database’s name to see it’s MySQL Database Information and that page will be the Host Name, which goes into DB_HOST. Probably something.secureserver.net where “something” is something.

After that it’s the moment of truth! Or should I say “Duck time!” because I copied the single wp-config.php into the louis folder via ftp, and pointed firefox at http://dejardin.org/louis and bam! WordPress was asking me for more information. But at least it was alive - so I provided some more information and then bam! I had a virtually empty nasty looking blog. The next thing I did was change the theme and start activating plugins, but that’s something beyond the scope of this post.

And my life has not been the same since.

Good times.

Some of this is from memory of course - I did create a mysql database to verify that part but I didn’t reinstall a new blog to verify the last part. If anyone does try what I’ve described please comment below with your results so I can correct any inaccuracies.