Setting up this Blog – aka How Awesome is WordPress?

When I set out in my mind to create a bit of a travel back in early 2012 for Kitty and I to use while travelling through Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong I quickly threw one together using the “Build me a WordPress Blog” type function within my GoDaddy account.

The result was functional and quite neat.  However the automated offering meant that it didn’t update as cleanly, nor did plug-ins work exactly as expected.  Probably because of the version/update lagging.

So upon our return (and despite the lack of use) I jumped onto http://download.wordpress.com and grabbed the latest release and ran the install over the existing one, suddenly we had a cleaner interface, and every plug-in we wanted just worked.  We still hardly used it though 🙂

So when it came time to make this Blog dream a reality I reached for the same tool.

Well lets put this into a timeline:

  1. 3pm – Decide today I’m “Going to do it”
  2. 3:15pm – Buy Domain using GoDaddy (already have an account so that’s just a few clicks)
  3. 3:30pm – It probably didn’t take 15 minutes but there’s always a minute or three between clicking the “Shutup and take my money” button and having the domains available to bind to the hosting control.  Anyway I did it.  Now I can hear you screaming “You host with Go Daddy? What are you?  Stupid?” – Yeah it’s cheap and somewhat cheerful, but it works for me.  I have more hardcore Hosting through http://stormhosts.com which has been excellent for a number years.
  4. 3:45pm – The Domains are bound to the file system, the permissions set so the config script can do its thing.  The MySQL Database created.
  5. 4pm – I’ve hit the Install page and bam the famous 5-minute process works.
  6. 6pm – I’ve tweaked the design, set up my preferred initial plug-ins, written a page and a couple of posts.  I’ve also fed the fleet of cats and tinkered with settings on our other WordPress site.

Yeah it’s safe to say that 3 hours go-to-whoa for anything in IT is not too shabby, especially when it’s multi-tasked around other things.  The result, while not bespoke is neat and clean, much better than my stagnant design skills could achieve and best of all everything is just a one-click config away.

So yes, I rate WordPress, and I rate it highly.