I’ve just got say “WOW!” on this one… I recently wanted to add a blog to one of our corporate web sites so we could begin publishing a few articles about the equipment we manufacture in that division (heavy industrial shredders). Now, I had set up a Blogger account back in 2009 for my personal blogging effort, where I post mostly about software development stuff I’m working on or studying. But for this new corporate blogging plan I knew I wanted it living on our own server that we would fully control, rather than the Blogger model where your stuff is kind of under some control of Blogger. (Not that they are evil or anything, I’m just saying it didn’t seem like the right choice for a corporate blog)

Anyway, I had heard about WordPress in the past, but never really knew what it was all about. Turns out… It’s VERY powerful, simple to install, easy to use, and free.

All you do is download the zip file from WordPress.org, then FTP it to a folder on your web hosting company, say in a /blog folder. It has great instructions on how to configure MySql to host your blog, and you have to edit a config file to wire it up once the database is setup. (MySql database is included in most web hosting accounts. Our corporate web sites live on 1and.com and the installation and configuration went very well).

The whole thing is written in PHP. Now, I know nothing about PHP but that really doesn’t matter. There’s a Control Panel that you hit with your browser to configure everything. You can create as many Authors as you want, you can create Categories for your posts, installing Themes is easy, and there are tons of useful plugins that are available to do all kinds of cool stuff. There is a huge community around this software, and I plan to dig into that a little more in the future.

I’m not trying to give a complete tutorial on how install and set it up. Those topics have been covered in tons of places already. My point is that this “tool” is awesome! I learned the basics and had it installed, configured, and live all in one stay-up-late evening. I’m sure you can too.

Oh, by the way… you can see the blog here: http://www.JordanReductionSolutions.com/blog