seanduguid79

[seanduguid79]

I believe every blogger fights with the best way to test and upgrade their blogs, at one point or another. So I'm putting up a series of articles on the best practices for managing blogs that i discovered in my career with a leading web design company in Aberdeen.

The first article in this series is to Setup a Testbed on your local computer, for safely testing changes to your Wordpress Blog. Once you are done testing, you may update your blog with relatively lower stress levels.

These are the steps that we’ll go through to achieve a local version of your blog.

1. Installing WAMPserver on your System

WAMP in Wampserver stands for Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP, and it provides an easy way to install the whole server environment on your local system. It includes Apache and MySQL servers with PHP support.

You may download Wampserver from here, the site provides easy documentation to download and install it. After installation and running, wampserver will appear as a Speedometer icon in the system tray.

If you can see this icon, you can open your browser and type http://localhost/, it should open the welcome page for your WAMP Installation. If you want to test more, create a simple webpage say hello.html in “c:\wamp\www” directory (if you chose default installation), and then test it using http://localhost/hello.html.

If this works fine, we are through with the first step.

Wampserver Configuration Panel

2. Modifying window’s HOSTs file

Running an application through “localhost” (your system’s default name) is fine, but it doesn’t give you the real feeling. If you are not completely copying the real server your blog is hosted on, you may miss something in testing – and it may come up as an annoying error while updating your actual blog online.

To call your system anything other than “localhost” you need to update the HOSTs file, located in your windows system folder – specifically “C:\windows\System32\drivers\etc“, depending on where your windows is installed. This is a text file, legacy of unix based systems, you may edit it in any text editor of your choice. Lets say your blog’s domain name is “myblog.com” – so you will add a line at the end of this file – given below.

127.0.0.1 localhost 127.0.0.1   www.myblog.com

Once you save it, your system will also be known as “www.myblog.com”. If you try opening it in your browser, your browser should show the Apache’s Welcome page.

3. Creating a Virtual Host in Apache

A Virtual Host is Apache’s term refering to the ability to run multiple domains from a single system – for example you can run – www.myblog.com and www.myblog1.com – both from the same system, with different files. For advanced understanding you may google more on this subject.

But in simple terms you need it, if you are managing multiple blogs. If you skip this step, your wordpress’ installation directory will be “c:/wamp/www”

To create a virtual host you will need to modify your Apache’s configuration files – “C:\wamp\bin\apache\apache2.2.8\conf\httpd.conf” – depending on where you installed your Apache. You can also open this file by left-clicking on the speedometer icon, and selecting “Apache > httpd.conf” option.

And add the following lines:

NameVirtualHost *:80 <VirtualHost *:80> ServerAdmin webmaster@dummy-host2.localhost DocumentRoot "c:/projects/www.myblog.com" ServerName www.myblog.com ServerAlias myblog </VirtualHost> <Directory "c:/projects/www.myblog.com/"> Options Indexes FollowSymLinks AllowOverride all Order Allow,Deny Allow from all </Directory>

Make sure that you have the mentioned directory available and accessible. Restarting Apache will make your domain run from the mentioned directory.

The result of this step will be that any html or php files in the “c:/projects/www.myblog.com/”, will be accessible from “http://www.myblog.com/”. This is going to be your wordpress’ installation directory.

You can put more <VirtualHost> and <Directory> entries for more domains you want to manage.

4. Installing Wordpress, themes and plugins

After step 2 or optionally step 3, you need to download and install wordpress from your Installation Directory – Unzip and Copy the wordpress files in this folder.

Before installing Wordpress, you need to create an empty MySQL Database, and probably create a user also. It helps to name the Database as close to what will appear on your actual host. Otherwise while updating on the real server you may need to change the wordpress’ config file.

You can access MySQL through phpMyAdmin – normally this will be available through http://localhost/phpmyadmin, you may again left click on the speedometer icon of Apache and access it directly. Once you have created the Database and respective MySQL user, you can now continue with the wordpress installation through your own domain – http://www.myblog.com. Accessing this url should start wordpress installation, if everything is set alright.

The wordpress’ famous 5-minute install, and updating themes and plug-ins should be familiar to you – for more information you can browse through http://codex.wordpress.org.

5. Testing and Updating your Blog

You may need to perform minor tweaks to match the apache configuration of your server. Most of these are simple like enabling Apache mods, and changing PHP.ini settings. After changing anything in Apache’s configuration, you may need to restart server again. Both of these can be easily done through options in the wampserver.exe.

Updating your blog generally means updating themes and plugins. Editing PHP is easy in any good text editor like editplus or textpad. As soon you save a change you can just refresh the browser to see the change in real-time.

With ease and peace of mind.

[seanduguid79]

Who Am I - Where Am I?

Most people are proud of their homes. They manicure their lawn, create color schemes, and hang pictures. 

Whether it’s been two weeks or two years, folks tend to feel a sense of pride for their space and for their home. You’ll see framed pictures on the walls, shelves of books that may or may not have been read, and of course a few odds and ends that sit around gathering dust. We see our homes and the stuff we stuff into them as a projection of ourselves. 

Our home says, “Hey! This is who I am! This is where I’ve been! This is what my interests are! I hate doing dishes!” Or something to that effect. Each time you invite someone into your home you are presenting that person with an image of who you are. Or at least, who you think you are. Or, who you want people to think you are.

My home has been a suitcase since December 29, 2013. My girl and I set off on an adventure that began in Houston, Texas and has led us to Berkeley, California. We’ve slept in a tent, in an American Hostel, hotels, motels, floors and cottages. We’ve been lucky and skilled and courageous. We packed the Honda Civic with all we own in the world and decided to go where life takes us. We don’t have a home. We have nothing to decorate, no walls to hang pictures of our past experiences. 

Our lives are lived in the now. 

Not having a home has it’s pros and cons. Both of us are getting a little tired of being on the road and not having a place of our own. Living the life of a vagabond can give you a feeling of independence and freedom, but at the same time leave you feeling strangely disconnected from the world around you. If my identity is wrapped up in my home (and I don’t <em>have </em>a home) what does that say about me? Who am I?

One the one hand, I like not looking at pictures of my past every day. It’s hard to grow as a person when you are anchored to your past. Seeing pictures of Prague sometimes makes me sad. I have to remind myself that if I were to go back there today it wouldn’t be the same. I’ve changed and I am changing daily. I am not the same person I was in Prague, or even in Texas. I’ve changed and I allow myself the freedom to change every day.

In a few weeks we are moving onwards to Seattle, Washington. I am excited about the possibilities of living in a new city and excited about beginning a new chapter in my life. I’m also excited about having a place to call my own, at least for a while. I guess that’s the best part about living life as a vagabond – I don’t have to stay any place. If we like Seattle and we find jobs we like, we’ll stay. If not, who knows. There is a big world out there just waiting to be explored.

For this American Vagabond home is where you just happen to be. And that is more than alright with me. I’d rather have a lot of experiences and memories than a matching bedroom set and a mortgage.

[seanduguid79]

Stay tuned for SEO tip sand tricks that work in 2019 folk - Sean