Since past 24 hours I’d been working towards setting up my own domain based Word Press Powered blog and in the process have learnt a lot about PHP and Word Press settings.
This How to will show how to setup a blog easily and effectively and not make the mistakes I’d made on the way , trust me a single” ‘ “ can make a hell lot of a difference and can take hours for a novice like me to fix .
The first step towards setting up the blog wa finding a domain , It was one hectic procedure , much or less like naming your first born , It has to be perfect and easy to remember and did I mention Unique .
I tried around a hundred names and variations and they all were taken from Twine to Tween , Opolis to Techfool all were gone and then one of my business associates handed me his card with their corporate slogan “ Intelligence Applied” written on it ( Note : already taken ) and then it hit me Sense Appplied is what I need and fortunately it was not taken as per whois.net
Second step was finding a hosting provider , I looked into a number of them as recommended by my friends such a Bluehost , Inspedium etc but finalized on GoDaddy , i’d been using them before and found them to be good and inexpensive . So i got their Deluxe Windows plan . On a side note I took Windows becasue of my preference , Linux plans are also available at the same cost and there is no difference .
Now I’ve have to setup a blog , on 25th Dec morning , I bought the domain and in a few hours got the page setup . GoDaddy offers one click WordPress installation through their applications program for free so i utilized that and in another couple of hours my WP database was functional .
Now comes the difficult part setting up the blog . I’ve had no prior experience of programming , I use software but I don’t write or modify them so making a custom CSS based WP theme was totally out of question so I went with the premade themes available through WP and other sources .
I installed around 8 themes before deciding on the one I want . A theme may look good on the preview but when used may not suit your needs , the same happened to me . The theme I wanted was pleasing to the eye but when I installed it and wrote a dummy post it was totally opposite to my needs so after a little research I managed to get another Theme which met my requirements .
Once installed , this theme had four blocks in the right side for ad , but no codes for Adsense . As I mentioned I’m not a programmer but to make the site work I installed Dreamweaver Cs4 trial and started going through code , sense is required , all programming is like normal english , I searched for keyword adsense in all the PHP files to see which one has it , finally one of the theme I got was supporting Adsense and after a little probing around I found the method to incorporate Adsense to my theme .
<!–Begin 125×125 Ad Block–>
<div class="adwrap">
<a href="<?php echo $artsee_banner_url_one; ?>"><img src="<?php echo $artsee_banner_image_one; ?>" style="border: none;" alt="advertisement" /></a>
<a href="<?php echo $artsee_banner_url_two; ?>"><img src="<?php echo $artsee_banner_image_two; ?>" style="border: none;" alt="advertisement" /></a>
<a href="<?php echo $artsee_banner_url_three; ?>"><img src="<?php echo $artsee_banner_image_three; ?>" style="border: none;" alt="advertisement" /></a>
<a href="<?php echo $artsee_banner_url_four; ?>"><img src="<?php echo $artsee_banner_image_four; ?>" style="border: none;" alt="advertisement" /></a>
</div>
<!–End 125×125 Ad Block—>
Was the actual code on Sidebar setup and I had to change it to
<!–Begin 125×125 Ad Block–>
<div class="adwrap">
<a href="<?php echo $artsee_banner_url_one; ?>"><?php include ‘adsense/onead.php’;?> </a>
</div>
<!–End 125×125 Ad Block—>
i also had to make an Adsense Folder in the root of Theme and incorporate a PHP file containing Adsense Code generated by Google .
All setup after 24 hours I’m ready to run the blog , I’ve started the test run and hopefully on the 1st of Jan 2009 the world will see
www.senseapplied.com
as the new destination to their ‘ making sense of the world around them “ fix .
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