So I’m finally done with setting up this blog. It was quite the undertaking, having no previous experience with setting up a domain, webhost, a subdomain, and eventually interacting with the WordPress software, but I would hope to say it was well worth it. If anything I did get an interesting experience out of it.

It all began when I signed up for this digital storytelling class. I had understood that the course was going to be artsy (duh! that’s why it satisfies the university’s art-performance requirement), but I had not expected to be taking the role of something so close to what I consider “cyberjournalism”.

Setting up the webhost and the domain was easy. I went to go daddy for the hosting services and to Cast-Iron Coding for the web hosting. The domain cost me about $1 a month because I purchased a .info domain, however, the web host did not come cheap. My instructor required a cpanel interface when selecting a webhost. I could have just as easily managed the whole thing using a terminal interface through secure shell being comfortable with a linux enviornment. I mean the whole blog service runs over a lampp enviornment anyway (I’ve already had to set one up in my Database Structures class).

Moving on, I hit a couple of snags with the setup of WordPress. I had intially started with a much different WordPress theme, and a much different slogan on the top of the page, but I had to reset my whole WordPress installation because I wanted a different slogan. It took me about a half hour to figure out that I needed to modify the folder permissions after uninstalling WordPress in order to delete them. After that, I was able to have the blog back up and running again.

Plugins were another easy matter. I set up an account with Google Analytics and generate the necessary keys I needed in my Google Account to get the WordPress plugin to work with my Google Account. The other plugin of concern was called Twitter Tools. Twitter Tools was another easy installation. It requires you to have a Twitter account in order to set one up. You have to read the instructions carefully because they’re ambiguous and easy to mess up.

This blog now has the ability to be updated from mobile. I enabled XML-RPC and am updating it right from the WordPress Android app!

But now everything’s up and running and I should be good to go for the time being. Still, I’m fairly uncomfortable with being this accessible. Blogging of any sort; whether it’s video blogging, messing around on myspace/twitter/facebook, using systems like wordpress or blogger, just seems to be a pastime for nerds who live in their mom’s basement and only talk about tech. Cyberspace just seems to be place where a person is better off anonymous. Is a obtaining and maintaining a “digital identity” worth this much trouble?