To fix this, I had to go to Settings and Permalinks to choose a new format for the post URL – there are a few ready-made formats to click and choose from – I decided to use the form

www.mikeafford.com/blog/$year/$month/$title_of_post

For this to work, I needed to add a .htaccess file to the main blog directory – rather strange that it wasn’t included in the installation. Anyway, with that in place, the new permalinks appeared immediately.

failed to write to disk

So obviously something strange was happening at my servers end – I initially thought it might be read/write permissions, but after a brief search on the WordPress forums, and another quick email to my hosting support, it turned out that I needed to set up a couple of customised php settings on my site. This might not be the case with every hosting provider, but I needed to go to my site control panel and click PHP settings and set the upload_tmp_dir to be /tmp . And also in my case I to actually create the /tmp directory itself (I guess up until now I didn’t really see the need to have one…)

But I wasn’t quite there yet. When I tried again, I got a brand new error

Unable to create directory
…………./blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/10. Is the parent directory writable by the server?

Now that smelt even more like file permissions than the last time – and sure enough that’s what it was.

Another quick scout around WordPress.org and I saw that they do say “A default WordPress installation comes with permissions settings for its files and folders (i.e. directories) that can be regarded as very secure.” I should say so. Particularly having a content folder into which you can’t actually place your content.

But they do give comprehensive instructions on how to change various permissions to get things working more smoothly. See Changing File Permissions for more information on this.

It’s also worth looking at htaccess for subdirectories which explains how to put back some of the security on folders that you’ve allowed more write access to – for example, restricting uploads of only image files (JPG, GIF, PNG) to that /tmp directory.

OK, with that all sorted, I’m fast approaching the time for customisation. Although the default template is sweet enough, I want to get my sticky paws on the HTML and CSS..

Step 1: I found this page on WordPress.org which details the procedure for installing WordPress on your own site (this assumes that you have your own domain, and FTP access to upload all of the WordPress files to your own site). Now, being a graphic designer, and itching to get on with the task of customising the page to make it look all arty and such, it’s fair to say that I only read the instructions briefly, so this might all end in disaster, but here goes…

Step 2: I downloaded WordPress 2.6.2 to my local machine (I’m using one of my Macs – a Dual 2 GHz PowerPC G5 – OSX v10.4.10) and unzipped the file.

Step 3: Using the control panel on my website supplied by my hosting company, I added a mySQL database – as this was the first database I’d added, all I had to do was select ‘default’ and there it was. Surprisingly easy so far. From reading the WordPress documentation I wondered if I needed to have a database called ‘wordpress’, but it seemed not so – I checked this by emailing my hosting support who replied within minutes (hats off to Mark at Supanames). The name of the database doesn’t matter, provided you enter it correctly in the wordpress config file (see Step 4 below).

Step 4: Now this bit I’m guessing wouldn’t be for the faint-hearted, but if you’re happy editing files that have lots of $’s and /’s and other gobbledegook in them then it’s quite straightforward. In the unzipped WordPress files you’ll find one called wp-config-sample.php – you need to edit this to include the name of your mySQL database, and your username and password. Also you need to set 3 secret keys – but instructions on what to do are included in the file itself. Once you’ve finished this, save the file as wp-config.php in the same folder where you found the original (wp-config-sample.php) file.

Step 5: I created a directory on my site called ‘blog’ in the top directory – so my blog should hopefully appear at www.mikeafford.com/blog . Then I FTP-ed the entire contents of the wordpress folder on my local machine into the ‘blog’ folder on the remote server. Another way of doing this would have been to rename the ‘wordpress’ folder to ‘blog’ and uploaded the folder itself to the top directory on your server (assuming you don’t already have one called ‘blog’ there already. Naturally enough.)

Success!

Step 6: In my browser I typed in the URL of my blog (mikeafford.com/blog) and there was the WordPress set-up page all ready for me to enter a title for the blog and my email address. With that completed, moments later the bog-standard blog appeared…

At this point my wife walked in and I proudly showed her my new blog. “That looks really good” she said.

I wonder if she’ll say the same after I’ve fiddled with the design…

Right now I’m having a few issues with uploading images, which may well be the subject of my next post.