This is a very brief and unorganised introduction to blogging. It (this page, not the blogging concept) started life as an email I sent to a mailing list. I figured it was worth putting up here permanently.

I use WordPress as my blogging system, installed on my own server space.

WordPress is a collection of open source PHP scripts that store data in a MySQL database. If you have access to a server that runs PHP and MySQL, you can download the WordPress package and install it. So if you have your own server somewhere you can set this up. In my case, I have server space on a computer in Colorado. My server runs PHP and MySQL, so I downloaded the WordPress package and then uploaded it to my space on my server. I’m running OS X on my PowerBook, which means I can also run PHP and MySQL on my local machine. So I also installed the WordPress package on my laptop. So I have a local copy of the setup that only I can access, plus the online version on my public web site.

As WordPress is all open source and PHP, I can edit it as much as I want. I’ve fixed a couple of small bugs, and I’ve customised parts of the system as well. When I get some time I’m going to tell the lead developers about these changes, and the changes might get implemented in the main WordPress distribution.

To write a post, I connect to my website, go to the password-protected admin area, and then type away. I could also use a desktop blogging application (like ecto or MarsEdit) to write posts and then upload them to my blog. This means I can write posts if I’ve got my laptop with me when I’m out in the field looking for snakes, then when I get back to civilisation I can upload all of those posts to my site.

If you don’t have your own server space somewhere, or you don’t want to muck around with that sort of thing, you can go to wordpress.com and sign up for a free account. I haven’t explored wordpress.com much, but from what I’ve seen it’s just like most other blogging sites out there, except that it runs the WordPress package. The advantages of signing up at wordpress.com are that you don’t need your own server, and you don’t need to know anything about PHP or MySQL to get going. The only disadvantage I can see is that you can’t customise the actual PHP code that the site runs on. But you can customise the basic look and feel of your blog. At the moment you’re also limited to the wordpress.com name space, so your blog will be something like snakeboy.wordpress.com. I think there are plans afoot to let you have your wordpress.com blog on your own domain name, but I don’t know any details about them.