Taking blogging seriously

So, I decided that I should take this blogging thing a bit more seriously because it would seem that people can make money at it. I've found a few pages of bloggers out there that post about making money on the fruit of their posts.

http://i.nconspicuo.us/2007/05/01/april-web-traffic-and-revenue-report/
http://www.johntp.com/make-money-online/


I figured, why not. I know I can contribute to the Internet population at large with what I learn through experience.

First, how to get started. I've read a few more pages of other bloggers and took notes on how their web sites are coming across. From what I see, WordPress is the thing to use if you are serious about blogging. I've got some an older computer (Compaq DeskPro with a Pentium II 400Mhz) in my basement that I've used to play around with Linux, so I decided to used that and host my own blog.

I've played around with Debian for a while. I am far from being a Linux expert, but I've been using different flavors of *nix for years now (AIX, HP-UX, SCO and the first viable commercial clone of Unix, Coherent - ah the memories).

First order of the day, update my Debian install. I was running the Sarge version and knew that a major upgrade has been released, so I downloaded the Sketch (4.0) version from debian.org and did the minimal network install. After I installed SSH so that I no longer had to sit at my Linux box in my cold basement.

apt-get install ssh

Google is my friend, so I found a good article on DebianAdmin.com. Let's see, I need Apache2 - checked - it is now part of Sarge, I also added php4 stuff:

apt-get install libapache2-mod-php4 php4-cli php4-common php4-cgi

I need MySQL - I run apt-get from the article.

apt-get install mysql-server-4.1 mysql-client-4.1
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Note, selecting mysql-client-5.0 instead of mysql-client-4.1

I guess it's an older article since MySQL 5 is now the current version. So I installed version 5. From there, I basically followed instructions from another page on DebianAdmin.com on how to setup MySQL.

Now here's where things got a bit confusing for me. The DebianAdmin.com article is not very clear on how to setup Apache to display your WordPress installation. Part of it is due to my lack of experience with Apache. There are a few key decision required at this time. Will you have your blogs show up under it's own domain (http://blog.acme.com) or as a sub-directory (http://www.acme.com/blog)? I wanted the sub-directory, so the instructions were fine after all.