I’m Beautiful Like Me.

I knew there was something bugging me about Blogger, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until I came across BlogBloke’s post about comments at Blogger sucking. They do suck! Why? They are a pain to access unless the blog owner has hacked the code for inline comments, they are still difficult unless one has an account with Google at Blogger or an OpenID and for all that trouble, there is still no link love! Plus, WordPress has Gravatars, which are the funk! I had been leaving comments all about the web for months without realizing the joy of Gravatars. Go realize the love!

So here is how I did it. Thanks to BlogBloke’s experience making the move himself to get me through it!

I’m not quite prepared yet to spend a monthly fee on hosting (remember Husband’s job sitch?!), but I was able to find powerful free hosting with 000webhost.com. Here’s what they give you:

• 250 MBs of Disk Space
• 100 GBs of Data Transfer
• PHP with MySQL Database Support

In other words, all you need for a small-time blog like mine! They even feature Fantastico De Luxe 1-Click Auto-Installer, but I was a nincompoop and did it the hard way.

Setting up your blog (the hard way like I did) is not quite as simple as it is with Blogger (despite what WP lovers everywhere might tell you!), but it’s a lot of fun if you like coding and tinkering to get things just so.

1. Sign up for free hosting at 000webhost.com. It’s pretty straight-forward.
2. Go to WordPress.org and download the .zip file. Make sure that you put it somewhere you can find it again later!
3. Follow the super-awesome tutorial at Bad Karma’s blog. Read the entire tutorial first. Look around the 000webhost.com cPanel as you read the tutorial to familiarize yourself with the layout.
4. Poke around the interwebs and find yourself some theme(s) and/or plug-ins. There are countless sources for WP themes - even instructions for creating your own. When you find the themes/plug-ins you want, download them and upload them via FTP to their respective directory (for themes, upload to /wp-content/themes; for plug-ins, upload to /wp-content/plug-ins). I really did not want to abandon my hard worked-for template at Blogger, so I found a theme that I was able to customize to look pretty close. I must admit, I may even like this one better!

Other tweaks I made:

• I created a folder named “uploads” and uploaded it via FTP to the /wp-content folder for images I’ll be using in my posts since I use Windows Live Writer offline to create my posts. If you are writing your posts inside of WordPress, this may be a step you can skip. You can also go under Settings -> Miscellaneous in WordPress and change the folder where uploads are saved.
• Changing permissions for online theme editing. In order to edit any of your themes online, you must first change file permissions in 000webhost. This is easily done by opening up the File Manager.

Then you select the box beside wp-content folder and click Chmod in the upper right corner.

Highlight the text field next to Chmod value and type in 777. Tick the boxes beside Chmod also the subdirectories within this directory and Chmod also the files within this directory. Click the big green check mark near the top of the page to apply and save.

That’s it! Now you can tweak your themes and their style sheets right inside of WordPress online, which is super handy when you are using FireBug! And since I created that uploads folder within the wp-content folder, it can now be accessed by WordPress to publish photos, too.

• Creating .htaccess file. It seems that perhaps sometimes the WordPress download comes with the .htaccess file, but mine was missing, so I had to create and upload the .htaccess file in order to publish my pages into their own permalinks.

This was pretty simple - just open up Notepad, save it as .htaccess and upload it to the public_html folder in 000webhost. Sometimes, there can be a problem saving a file that starts with a “.” and if this happens to you, you can name it l.htaccess (or somesuch) offline, upload and rename in the file manager.

• Changing .htaccess permissions to enable permalinks. If you want your posts to have their own pages (and permalinks), you will need to change the file permissions of the .htaccess file so that WordPress can write to it.

Open up the file manager. Tick the box beside the .htaccess file and select Chmod in the upper right hand corner.

This time you want to change the Chmod Value to 666. Click the big green check mark near the top to apply and save.

Now you’ll want to go to Settings -> Permalink in WordPress to select how you would like your permalinks to be structured.

Not so bad, eh?

The test blog got most of the wrinkles ironed out, but I did still experience a couple of glitches when I finally moved the domain name and set up a new hosted account. Here’s wishing you the best of luck in setting up your free self-hosted WordPress account!