After using Movable Type for an hour or so and trying to customize it, I found it to be irritatingly slow. I tried installing the Open Source version, but it was not much faster. It would take around 30 seconds to publish and 20 seconds to go to a different admin page, which got really frustrating after a while, especially after installing Movable Type four times (see previous post).
So, I decided to switch to WordPress, one of the other two popular blogging applications (the other being Blogger). The install was very simple and very fast. For my reference and yours, here is what I did:
First, I created a MySQL database called wordpress. Then, I downloaded latest.tar.gz from the WordPress website onto my web server. Next, I unzipped that file and moved all of its contents to /home/public/. Then, I copied the file config-sample.php to config.php, and in config.php, I entered my database information and put in four security keys randomly generated from the wordpress random key generator. Finally, I opened a web browser and went to wp-admin/install.php where I entered a name for my blog and my email address, hit continue, and then I was done! Amazing.
I ran into some early problems with permissions, such as uploaded images not appearing. So I changed the group of all of the files in /home/public to web, changed all file permissions to 644 so my web server could write to them, and changed the permissions for /home/public/wp-content/ and /home/public/wp-content/uploads to 775 so that my web server could put my uploaded files in the uploads directory. I think that was it.
Finally, I searched for a brainy WordPress theme and first found Big Blue Brain Theme but later found Brain Power Theme, which is an awesome theme. I tweaked it in many places to make spacing, color, and other little things nicer to me, and this modified theme is what is currently styling this site. I hope you like it too!
WordPress is not lightning fast, but not agonizingly slow either, so I think I’ll stick with it. Plus, this theme rocks!