Swiftcurrent Reflections

This post is basically for Josh. For those of you who don’t care about the behind-the-scenes details of blogs, maybe go and check this out. OK, for the rest of you….

Swiftcurrent Reflections was started using Blogger. It was quick and easy. Now you can have blogger host your blog, like Meg does (anyone with a name.blogspot.com address does this), they can host your blog with a domain name you purchased (so you could have everything on their server, but instead of using crazyblog.blogspot.com, you could just use crazyblog.com; that URL would just point to their server), or you can do what I did and have your own server, and Blogger would FTP all the files to it. Now, “my own” server is a bit misleading. I bought hosting capability through 1&1. I have been using them for over four years now and am happy with their service. I acutally only have one server space through them, but swiftcurrentphoto.com, billanderson.name, and andersonupshaw.com all point to the same server, they just have thier root in different directories. Sneaky, huh?

OK, so now what about Wordpress? It is designed to run on a web server that has PHP scripting ability and MySQL installed. Almost any web server has this, as does 1&1. Setting it up was easy. Just download the .zip file from Wordpress, un-zip it, use the web-based control panel at 1&1 to setup the MySQL server, update just one test config file from the Wordpress download with the MySQL info, then upload that batch of files to server. Done. Blog is running.

While I did this at a remote server, the process would be the same if you had a server in your house. While I leave a couple of my computers on 24/7, I really don’t want to be worried about uptime. I don’t have a static IP address either. While I use dyndns.com, that’s not the best for a server. And then there is bandwidth. I don’t want to be streaming a movie and then have a number of people hitting my blog at the same time (I doubt that would happen in my case, but still…) and killing my movie. Plus, Comcast has usage caps… I’ll stick with 1&1.

More questions? Comment away!