Hey, I’ve just written a “Self-Hosted WordPress Blog Guide” for beginners to download for FREE.

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Some of you may wonder: “Why do I want to write this WordPress blog setup guide?”

Well, several people have already asked me this question – “How to set up a self-hosted WordPress blog with own domain name?” and some wanted me to guide them through the entire process, with step-by-step instruction.

I can understand how difficult it can be when you are first starting out as a complete beginner. I know exactly how beginners feel as I’ve been going through all this myself. And for that reason, I’m willing to share this information with beginners and have written this guide.

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Last 2 days, I almost went crazy when I found out that I couldn’t login to my WordPress blog anymore even though had successfully upgraded to WordPress 2.9.2. Every time i went to the wp-admin page, it was being redirected to error 404 page.

I did try to get help from WordPress Support Forums and BlogCatalog but luck was not with me. At that moment, I really didn’t know what to do already and even thought of rebuilding this blog again. Luckily, I procrastinated the idea and decided to investigate further.

So what I did was that I created a php file named test.php with the following code in it:

and then place it one each under root and wp-admin folder. What happened was that the test.php was working fine under the root folder but NOT for the wp-admin folder. Ah-hah! This had at least given me some hints why I was not able to access any php files inside of wp-admin folder. Then I proceeded to creating a temporary folder, for example called ‘testphp’ under root and copy the test.php into it to test if the php file was working fine. Yes, it worked! At that moment, I had the strong feeling that I could identify the root cause of the problem.

What I did after that was I compared the permission between ‘testphp’ of the wp-admin folders. Guess what, I discovered that the permission between the 2 folders were somehow different where ’testphp’ and wp-admin folder were having permission 755 and 777 respectively. I was not sure why permission of wp-admin had been changed to 777 during WordPress upgrade process. Anyway, I proceeded to changing the permission from 777 to 755. Bingo! It has started to work again and I have a sigh of relief.

Just in case you encounter almost the same kind of problem as I described above in the future, please be sure to check if the permission of the wp-admin folder is set to 755 before proceeding to finding out other potential root cause such as file permission, corrupted/missing files and so on.

Thanks for reading my long winded story!

Recently, I’ve been introduced to a free open-source software package that allows us to set up an emulated web server hosting environment for installing and testing WordPress locally on a personal computer. This software is called XAMPP and it’s an easy-to-install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. Currently, XAMPP is available for operating system Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and Solaris.

Where To Get XAMPP?

A link to the XAMPP download page for each operating system can be found here.

I have downloaded  XAMPP .EXE Installer for Windows and successfully installed it on my personal computer that runs under Windows Vista. If you’re interested to know how I did that, please continue reading…

How To Install XAMPP?

Now, let me show you in step by step on how to install XAMPP and make Windows Vista computer a web server. At this time of writing, the latest version is XAMPP Windows 1.7.3 (the installer file is xampp-win32-1.7.3.exe).

1. Download the XAMPP .EXE Installer for Windows.

2. Double-click the .EXE Installer.

3. Install XAMPP to the default destination folder (C:).

4. Wait until installation progress bar to turn completely green. A command prompt window will pop up after that.

5. Leave the default value and press <Enter> key. Repeat the step until you see this prompt:

6. Type ’1′ and press <Enter> key. Wait until XAMPP Control Panel Application appears on the screen.

7. ‘Tick‘ the Svc for Apache to start Apache service. Click ‘OK‘ button when dialog box appears.

8. ‘Tick‘ the Svc for MySql to start MySql service. Click ‘OK‘ button when dialog box appears.

9. Click ‘Start‘ button to start Apache service. Wait until the ‘Running‘ text appears.

10. Click ‘Start‘ button to start MySql service. Wait until the ‘Running‘ text appears.

At this juncture, your XAMPP Control Panel Application should look like this.

11. Enter ‘http://localhost/xampp‘ on your web browser.

12. Congratulations if you receive a message showing that “You have successfully installed XAMPP on this system!” as shown below.

Have you successfully installed XAMPP on your personal computer? If successful, please proceed to the next steps.

How To Set Up MySQL Database for WordPress?

Now, I’m going to show you how to configure MySQL database for WordPress.

1. Enter ‘http://localhost/phpmyadmin‘ on your web browser.

2. Under MySQL localhost section, enter database name as ‘wordpress_db‘ and click ‘Create‘ button. You’ll receive a message showing that ‘Database wordpress_db has been created‘. Take note: This value ‘wordpress_db‘ will be used at the later stage when we configure WordPress.

3. Go back to phpMyAdmin Home (‘http://localhost/phpmyadmin‘) again.

4. Click on ‘Privileges‘ tab and click on a link: ‘Add a new user‘.

5. Fill in the form. For the User name field, enter ‘wordpress_user‘. For host, select ‘Local‘. Take note: This value ‘wordpress_user‘ will also be used at the later stage when we configure WordPress.

6. For better security, just click ‘Generate‘ button to randomly generate a password.

7. Write down the User name and Password generated on your screen. Take note: Never use the password shown in the image above.

8. Under ‘Global privileges‘ section, click on ‘Check All‘.

9. Click ‘Go‘ button. If everything goes well, you’ll see a message saying that ‘You have added a new user‘.

10. Under the ‘Database-specific privileges‘ section, for the ‘Add privileges on the following database’ field, select ‘wordpress_db‘ from the list. This will add ‘wordpress_user‘ as a database user of wordpress table, wordpress_db.

Alright, you’ve just set up a MySQL database for WordPress using phpMyAdmin. Please give yourself a pat in the back before moving on!

How To Install WordPress Locally On Your Computer?

1. Download latest version of WordPress and save it on your computer.

2. Navigate to ‘C:xampphtdocs‘ folder.

3. Open up the WordPress ZIP file you downloaded and copy ‘wordpress‘ folder to the ‘htdocs‘ folder.

4. Inside the wordpress folder, open ‘wp-config-sample.php‘ file using notepad or your favorite text editor. My favorite text editor is ConTEXT.

5. Fill in the information with your database information and save it as wp-config.php in the same folder. Take note: Please use the password you’ve written down earlier.

6. Enter ‘http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php‘ on your web browser. If you did correctly, you should be greeted with a WordPress Installation screen.

7. Just fill in the Blog Title and Your E-mail. Then, click ‘Install WordPress‘ button.

8. Below screen shows WordPress installation successful. Take note: username and password generated on your screen will be used for WordPress admin login so please write it down .

9. Now you can open your WordPress Blog locally using this address: ‘http://localhost/wordpress‘.

10. To make any changes on your WordPerss Blog, go to WordPress admin login page at ‘http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin‘, and login with your username and password generated earlier.

These are just the steps you need to do to install WordPress Blog locally on a personal computer. With this emulated web server hosting environment, you can test out different WordPress Themes and Plugins or any web scripts before making it live to your web hosting server.

Hope you find this guide useful and informative!

Blogging is no longer just a fad or something that individuals do in their free time to broadcast stuff happening in their daily lives. Today, blogging has already become an important part of many people’s lives and a profession to some individuals.

In recent years, blogging has brought changes to politics, business and society. Many politicians are using blogs as a tool to connect and reach out to their constituents or voters. Many business owners are leveraging blogging as a platform to promote their business and even to manage customer complaints to bring their business to new heights, either online or offline. What is interesting to me is that blogging has also created an excellent opportunity for anyone who wants to Make Money Online from the comfort of their home.

If you’re looking for a step-by-step guide to help you to start a Money Making Blog and learn how to blog like a ProBlogger, I strongly urge you to at least check out a proven blogging system called Atomic Blogging 3.0. This product has been rated highly by many top Internet marketing Gurus and tested by thousands of bloggers around the world including myself.

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Some of you may have been wondering what happened to my WordPress blog as it was unavailable for a few days. I’m sorry, something unexpected happened last Saturday resulted in an unrecoverable crash to my WordPress Database and all the previous data has been lost.

This is what my WordPress Blog looked like in the past.

I’m coming back now. But, I’m still in the midst of rebuilding my blog….of course with a new WordPress Theme. This time round I’m going to pick a Theme from WooThemes, one of the top WordPress Theme sites with tons of high quality WordPress Blog Themes.

Please bear with me for the time being! I will get this self-hosted WordPress Blog up and running again as soon as possible.

No matter what, as always, thank you so much for your support all this while! It really means a lot to me.

To show my appreciation, I’m giving away the following gifts to all my blog readers.

1. The Secret To Personal Power

2. Affiliate Money Secret

3. Self-Help PLR

4. Twitter People

Go download all of them now and I hope they would make great early Christmas presents for you guys.

Please visit my blog again.