Weaning yourself off LJ: First steps

This is part of a series on how you can easily create a fannish archive website using WordPress. The introductory article talks about why you might want to do that, so now it’s time to get down to the nitty-gritty.

Get yourself some hosting

1. Sign up for Dreamhost or some similar hosting provider. Dreamhost will cost you less than $10/month ($7.95 if you pay in advance) and you can share that between as many people as you want. (Disclaimer)
2. Register a domain name. On Dreamhost, you get one free domain registration when you sign up. Use the Dreamhost Panel and choose “Domains” then “Registration” and follow the steps. I registered aroomofonesown.org for my fan archive, and I’ll be using it as a demonstration throughout this series of articles.
3. Set up web hosting for your domain. In the Dreamhost panel, go to “Domains”, “Manage Domains”, then “Add new domain/subdomain” and fill in the first form to “Fully host this domain”. The only thing you should need to change or specify is a username for the site to run as (this will be where you upload certain things, later) and whether you want your site to have “www” on the front of it or not.

You now have a website! You should receive email telling you that it’s been set up, and you should be able to visit your website and see… well, nothing, actually. But it exists!

(You probably also want to set up some email addresses for your domain. Go to “Mail” then “Manage Email” and set up addresses for yourself and postmaster at your domain, for now. You need a postmaster address otherwise some other sites will think you’re a spammer and won’t let you send mail.)

Installing WordPress

1. In the Dreamhost Panel, choose “Goodies” then “One-click installs”.
2. Wordpress is selected by default. You’ll need to choose a location to install to. In my case, I want my site to have an entry/disclaimer page (“Hi, this site contains sexually explicit content!”) so I’ll want that to appear as the top level page on my site, and the archive (aka Wordpress) to be installed in a subdirectory. I chose “fanworks” as the name of my subdirectory:


3. Set up your database. Click this thumbnail to see a screencap of how I did mine:

4. Click “Install it for me now!”
5. You should receive an email shortly, telling you Wordpress has been installed and giving you a link to follow to complete the setup. Click on that link and follow the instructions.
6. It will set up an admin user for you. Login as that admin user.
7. Change your admin password! Top right corner, “My Profile”. You won’t actually use this admin user after this, so it can be a really hard-to-remember one. Best if it is, in fact.
8. You’ll see you’re in the “Users” area. There are tabs near the top, below the main menu. Click on “Authors & Users” and add a new user for yourself. Give it the name under which you want to be known, and make it an “Administrator”. Now you’ll never have to login as “admin” again.

At this point you should be able to see your website in all its glory. Here’s what mine looks like:

Make your first post

1. In the top menu, click on “Write”. You’ll see an editor window. Paste your story in here. I took this cyberpunk Hornblower AU from LJ and copied it from there into Wordpress, and it maintained its formatting — up to and including the <lj-user> link to my beta reader! (If you want to hand-edit the HTML, you can click on the “Source” tab above the editing window.)
2. Click “Publish”. How easy is that? Here it is!

A bit of cleaning up

There are a couple of small things you probably want to do right now to make things a bit nicer.

1. Remove the “hello world” post that Wordpress posted for you. You can click on “Edit” just below that post and then “Delete this post”.
2. Make your URLs friendlier. In the admin interface, go to “Options” then “Permalinks” and choose “Date and name based”.
3. Remove unwanted links from the “Blogroll” in the sidebar. Go to “Blogroll” in the admin menu, check all the boxes, then click on “Delete”. You can add in links of your own if you like, but I’ll be covering this in more detail in the next article in this series.

And you’re done!

Now you have a Wordpress site set up where you can post stories to your heart’s content. It probably looks something like this:

For now, you can carry on posting stories. In the next article, I’ll be talking about how you can add other contributors, categorise your stories, set up static pages, add links to other sites, and make your site look somewhat better by using one of the pre-installed themes.

Disclaimer:
I get a referral bonus if you follow that link. Any of a number of web hosting providers will offer you similar service, but I know Dreamhost is a popular choice among fans. Many of my instructions will be a little bit Dreamhost specific, since that’s the service I use and I can provide specific instructions for it which may not work exactly the same way on other hosting providers. Fans using Dreamhost recently had some drama when DH shut down sites which were sharing video files in violation of copyright, but this only applied to people sharing (for example) whole seasons of TV shows as AVIs, and not to fanvids. I’ve been hosting fanvids with them for years and no problems so far.