blogmaking.net

Making your blog your homepage (redirecting it)

catherine — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 06:34:48 +0000

Now that I’ve got quite a bit written and got rid of the defaults, I’m pretty okay with displaying my site to the rest of the world. However, because I set my blog up in a folder called “blog”, if you want to see my blog, you need to go to http://www.blogmaking.net/blog/. I’d like everyone who goes to http://www.blogmaking.net to see my blog straight away. To do this, I’m going to have to do a redirection.

If you set up your blog in your main folder then ignore this step because when people go to your domain http://www.yourdomain.com they should just go straight to your blog already.

Micfo’s cpanel is really easy. You just need to click on the “redirects” icon. You are given two boxes, the first is the domain you want to map (so in my case I would leave it as htpp://www.blogmaking.net/ and then nothing as I want the homepage to redirect) and then you give the address you want to redirect it to… so I put in www.blogmaking.net/blog/ because that’s what I want to show up in the browser.

I’m still trying to work out the dreamhost redirect. I’ve put in a help ticket so hopefully they’ll get back to me soon.

Edit: They did get back to me and did the redirect for me which was really nice. It was a simple little trick that I imagine would work with other folders (eg if you have set up another content management system like drupal in a folder called “drupal”). They created a php page: index.php and stored it in the root folder (ie the main folder not the blog folder if you have them separate). To do this open a text file in something like notepad or another plain text editor and type the following code:

where “http:blogmaking.net” is your domain name and “blog” is the name of your wordpress folder. Save this file as “index.php” and upload it (via FTP or your host’s web file manager) to your root/main folder for your domain.

Making an index page/placeholder

Cathy — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 22:57:02 +0000

If you set up your blog in a root folder ignore this post, when someone types in your domain they will go straight to your blog.

If you set up your blog in a folder other than the root, you might like to make a placeholder page so when someone visits your domain they get something more than a list of folders until you are ready to do a redirect. It’s also a good idea to do this if you don’t feel ready for anyone to see your blog quite yet because usually clicking on the folder that shows up on your homepage will show your blog if that’s where you set it up.

This is an optional step and if you don’t care who sees you making your blog then ignore this and do a redirect now or whenever you like. I usually like to wait until I’ve removed some of the default elements and put up a new theme.

If you place a simple text document called index.html (or index.htm) in your root folder then when someone visits http://domain.com/ they will see that file (http://domain.com/index.html). Mine is no longer there, but you can check out an archived copy at http://www.blogmaking.net/stuff/index.html.

Open a text editor like Notepad and copy and paste the following code, changing the title and the content (in bold) to what you want to say. Save it as “index.html” or “index.htm” and upload it to your root folder. Now when you go to your domain, you should see the text: “hello this is my blog which I’m currently making, soon it will be ready to see but not yet!” (or whatever you changed it to). Not very fancy but just a simple placeholder. If you have more advanced skills/use Dreamweaver, feel free to do something more impressive. (*It’s actually quite hard to show code on a web document as the browser interprets the code, here’s a site where you can enter the code you want to display and it will give you what you need to cut and paste into your document so that the code displays properly: Felgall Internet - Displaying HTML Source Code in Web Pages)

“http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd”>

<strong>my bloggie!</strong>

hello this is my blog which I’m currently making, soon it will be ready to see but not yet!

Setting up email

catherine — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 14:33:52 +0000

It’s a good idea to set up an email address from that address. In dreamhost if you click on Mail/Manage Email, you’ll find the “create a new email address” link and this will let you create email forwarders and pop3 mailboxes. Definitely create an admin address that you can use when you set up your wordpress installation: admin@domain.com and you might also want to create some forwarders like me@domain.com.