In the past few weeks, I’ve tested a few blogging platforms for the upcoming launch of Geeksaresexy.net, and right now, I hesitate between 2 alternatives: WordPress and Textpattern. I’ll be fooling around with both in coming weeks to familiarize myself with them. I have now been running WordPress for a week or so, and I must say that I am quite impressed by its ease of installation. Running a local version of your blog Here’s a little guide that will help you install and run WordPress locally on your XP box in less then 10 minutes: 1- Get XAMPP lite for Windows. Choose the exe version, and install it at the root of your C drive. is very useful because it lets you fool around with themes and plugins to your heart’s desire without having to risk breaking your live blog.

2- Browse to C:\xampplite and double click setup_xampp.bat

3- Once that is done, double click xampp-control.exe and start the Apache and Mysql services.

4- Open your browser and go to this address: http://localhost/. 5- Now that the interface displays a language that you can understand, click on phpMyAdmin (on the left column once again) 6- Enter “wordpress” (without quotes) in the “Create New Database” Field, and select utf8_unicode_ci in the drop down box in the next field (as shown in the picture below). Click on Create. The Xampp setup is now complete. From the menu on the left column, choose your preferred language.

7- Download WordPress and unzip it under c:\xampplite\htdocs. 8- You should now have a wordpress folder under c:\xampplite\htdocs. Browse to the folder, and you will see a file named wp-config-sample.php. Open it in your favourite text editor // ** MySQL settings ** // define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘wordpress’); // The name of the database define(‘DB_USER’, ‘root’); // Your MySQL username define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ”); // …and password (needs to be empty, just for local install) define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value and replace the default values by the ones you see under this paragraph. Save the file as wp-config.php (under the same folder). 9- Open your browser and navigate to http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php , follow the instructions, and voila, you are done. That was easy wasn’t it?