This post was written for the students of the Columbia College Chicago class Blogging: Beyond the Basics in the Fall semester of 2014. It likely refers to specific software or settings that may quickly be out of date and may not apply to your situation, even in a future semester of the same class.

Most everything in life is a trade-off and our choice of blogging platform is no exception. For this class we’re going to use the popular WordPress platform, hosted by the IAM Department server. This is going to give us a lot of options for themes and plug-ins and a lot of control over many aspects of our blog. But it also means we’re going to have to exercise a lot of that control, especially just to get the blog going.

You can copy and paste most the commands on this page into the command line, but watch out for things like “your.name” and change them to, you know, your name.

The first thing we’re going to do is to open up Terminal on a Mac or Putty on a Windows computer and connect using our IAM accounts and passwords (the same account we use to log into the Macs in the classroom).

On a Mac, type this into the Terminal command line. (On a Windows machine, open up Putty and put students.iam.colum.edu as the server to connect to, then login with your.name and your IAM password.)

ssh your.name@students.iam.colum.edu

The first time you log in on any particular machine you’ll need to accept a warning about authenticity. Please do so and then use your IAM password to log in. First we’re going to run a command to create some folders and set our permissions correctly, and then we’re going to edit the default configuration file with the ‘nano’ text editor:

./.wpperms.sh
nano public_html/wordpress/wp-config.php

Use the down-arrow key to scroll down and find the line that reads:

$table_prefix = 'wp_BBBFA2014_';

Use the arrow keys to position the cursor after the last underscore and add your name so that it reads:

$table_prefix = 'wp_BBBFA2014_your_name';

Press control-X to exit nano and press Y and then return to confirm saving your changes without changing the file name.

Now open up any browser and navigate to: http://students.iam.colum.edu/~your.name/wordpress/

You’ll be prompted to choose:

Site Title
Username
Password
Your E-mail

Fill those in as appropriate and then click Install Wordpress.