WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

I downloaded the tar ball of latest version i.e. WordPress 2.7.1 from http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

Extracted it to …./tamilg.in/public/

Then created database and user for WordPress in MySQL command line.

–Create database
CREATE DATABASE database_name;

–Create user  (Optional)
CREATE USER ‘username’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘password’;

–Grant permission to user on that database
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON database_name.* TO ‘username’@'localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘password’;

Then copied wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php and updated DB_NAME, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD, DB_HOST. Added some random characters to AUTH_KEY, SECURE_AUTH_KEY, LOGGED_IN_KEY and NONCE_KEY.

Now opened the page http://tamilg.in/ in the browser and it asked for the Blog Title and Email Id. Clicked on the Install WordPress button and got the admin password.

The first step I always follow is to login to the WordPress Dashboard and change the password to something easy to remember.

Now that the basic installtion is complete. Next step is to upload/activate necessary plugins for a standard blog. This includes All-in-One SEO, Google Analytics, XML-Sitemap and Share/Save Buttons. I’m yet to API key for Akismet – TODO task pending!!!

I downloaded the Fusion theme from WordPress Theme repository and extracted to the theme folder and activated it.

Last step??? Started blogging!!!