I’ve replaced our old UltraSparc machine running Apache 1.3.3 under Redhat 6.2, with a new sever running Apache 2.4.3 under Centos 6.3. PHP has been upgraded to 5.3.3, MySQL 5.1.66, and Perl to 5.10.1.
This allows running modern applications like WordPress, Drupal (Drupal 6 works properly at this point, there is currently some issues with Drupal 7), the current version of SquirrelMail, CopperMine, and phpBB.
What you are reading here now is a blog using WordPress. I used to blog using Blogger.com and FTP publishing to publish to my website here. Shortly after Google ate Blogger, they discontinued FTP publishing leaving me and a lot of others in a lurch.
WordPress has available a Blogger Import module. I used it to move my blogs from Blogger over to WordPress and get them back to where I could post, in the original locations.
The import module mostly worked. I failed to import any links I had to video. Otherwise I got my blogs back pretty easy, and, so can you! To set up a WordPress blog, all you need to do is login to shellx.eskimo.com and cd to your public_html directory. Decide where you want your blog to be, suppose it’s ~username/blog (blog in your home directory), cp the WordPress files to that location. I’ve made that easy for you by unpacking a copy of wordpress into /misc/wordpress.
cd public_html
cp -a /misc/wordpress blog
Then with your browser, go to http://www.eskimo.com/~username/blog
If you do not yet have a MySQL database, request one from support. That will happen fast now because I’ve scripted adding new users to MySQL so I no longer have to get my MySQL book out and try to remember how to setup the grant tables because it’s been six years since last time. Now I just type ‘myadd username’ and boom, it’s done.
So once you have that, WordPress will inform you that you don’t have a config file, and offer to create one. You accept, and will prompt for a database name, that will be the same as your username, which it will also prompt for, and a password. If you already have a MySQL database, the password will be whatever it is, if you ask me to create one, include the password you wish to use. Lastly, it will ask for the table prefix which by default will be ws_. The only reason you might wish to change this is that you have more than one WordPress installation (if you maintain multiple blogs as I do, that will be the case), then do something like ws_blogname_ instead of just ws_.
Now click the install button, then login to your new blog and begin customizing as you desire. There are a gazillion themes to choose from and the majority have a great deal of ability to be customized.
As a general rule, you want to install the plugins you need and not more than you need because each additional plugin is that much more PHP code to load and execute and so slows the overall performance of your blog.
For example, to import a blog from blogger, you’ll need the blogger import plugin, but after you’ve imported the blog, you no longer need it so get rid of it.