My Blogging AttemptS

I got encouraged to do my share of blogging. Realizing how much communicating (read: talking) I do in a day, it won’t be so bad to put those into writing. And being a DSP (Digital Signal Processing) girl, which is quite a rarity, I thought it would be interesting to write about that field! I’m actually (still) working on my thesis, and I plan to write A LOT about it! (Hey, writing is a very good way of releasing stress, right?!)

And being an EEE (Electrical and Electronics Engineering) instructor here in UP Diliman, I believe my experiences here are also worth a read! So, expect articles on DSP, EEE, my family, friends, parties, movies, music… well, basically, just everything I could think of writing about!

So I thought I was ready to blog! I was thinking I could just have blogspot host my site. But Philip said he could provide me a login to a server which could host my site. And I thought, ‘great!’ But I was so hell wrong!!! Having blogspot host it would have been easier (sorry Philip! Haha!), but it would have not pushed me to review my Linux skills, which by the way I need for this coming semester. Well, I am a GUI girl, and doing stuff using command lines is really NOT my thing! But like I said, I had to go through it. So here are my boo-boos and some successes…

1. He gave me a username and a password and he said ‘login to fiveclouds.com’. And I did but I wasn’t able to get in… the only bit is that I did it using a web browser! Well, he didn’t say anything about doing it somewhere else…
2. Ok. No more web browser, I used SSH. So with the SSH thing that I have, I typed in ‘fiveclouds.com’, ‘dae’ and my password. And with what I expect, all I see are FOLDERS! And then he started saying stuff like “you can try sudo su…” and I was “where the hell am I going to type all that when all I see are folders???” and he laughed his ass off saying I need an SSH client and not a file transfer client! How would I know that? The only SSH I have ever encountered in my life is the SSH Secure File Transfer Client.
3. So he asked me to download PuTTY. And I did. And then it looks familiar. It’s just like the Linux terminal that I used when I taught EEE11 (Intro to C Programming) 2 years ago. But I could say that up to this point, ‘Dae’ and ‘Linux’ don’t quite go well together… So I have the right SSH thing and he said all I need is WordPress, MySQL, and he even mentioned Apache… alien words, baby, alien words! (These are the kinds of words that I have heard before but I forgot in a snap…)
4. Being in UP taught me to study on my own. So, I tried searching for these things: WordPress (which, with what I know, is just an open source publishing platform) and MySQL (an open source database). But then at that time, what kept on bugging me was, how will I be able to set up a blog if all I see are command lines? And I can’t even make my screen green on black!!! Very naïve, right?! But I really can’t get that out of my head! Where will WordPress and MySQL come in? So I stopped reading stuff on the net and just emailed Philip for help! Clever!!!
5. And then some things became clearer. I downloaded WordPress using PuTTY, moved it my local folder, unzipped it, remove the zipped version, and change the ownership of the files to www-data. For those interested, these are the codes I had to type:

o       wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

o       mv latest.tar.gz ./dae/

o       cd /var/dae

o       gzip -d latest.tar.gz

o       tar xvf latest.tar

o       rm latest.tar

o       chown -R www-data:www-data /var/dae

Of course I didn’t think of these lines on my own. Philip became my official distance learning instructor haha!

So I already have my WordPress directory. And yes, lots more to be done! (Come on… who memorizes all these stuff???) Next was creating my database. I typed mysql and got a mysql prompt >. And again, these are the stuff that I typed:

o       create database dae (creating my database)

o       grant all on dae.* to dae@localhost identified by ’something’; (creating a user)

o       exit (to exit from the mysql tool)

o       cd /etc/apache2/sites-available (go to this folder)

o       cp pendo2 dae (copying the pendo2 file to a file called dae)

I edited dae (the file) using vi. Thank God, another familiar thing from 2 years ago! And yes, my domain name is daejavu.com, cool ‘eh?! And it actually makes sense   (thanks to Winston!)

o       DocumentRoot       /var/dae/wordpress

o       ServerName           daejavu.com

o       ServerAlias             *.daejavu.com

And the last command in PuTTY I typed (at least for that day) was a2ensite dae to enable the webserver configuration that we just did!

6. Ready to blog, yet?? Not quite! We do have a proxy in UP which apparently would cause trouble on me seeing the site… (again some more web stuff that I don’t fully understand. I just take it as it is ) Good thing, the day after, Philip was able to set it all up and I could already go to my site but to my surprise, another error popped out, something to do with a wp-config.php file! (Can setting up a blog get more difficult and complicated than this :-p ?!)
7. And oh, my PuTTY screen is already green on black with a blinking pink _ cursor! And this I did on my own! Awesome!  

Until this day, my blog ain’t set up, yet… At least my (very long) first entry is

And now, I can’t wait!

A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.

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