A little background

When I started working on adding this blog to my site I immediately went to Wordpress and downloaded the latest version. I followed the instructions and looked up a few tutorials, and thought I had this thing down pat. I then downloaded MySql installed it and ran into a huge problem. I’m behind a firewall. What’s a girl to do? Go to google that’s what! So I looked up blogs that don’t require a database and low and behold I come across Flatpress. Now flatpress has a wiki with instructions on how to install but I thought I could make it a little simpler for people to understand exactly what they should do. If you’re in the same situation as me and want this stuff explained as straight forward as possible then keep reading.

Step 1. Download Flatpress

fp_logo.jpg
It’s free, just like Wordpress so just do it. Go to: http://sourceforge.net/projects/flatpress/files/ and grab the latest version.

Step 2. Unpackage the file

Just double click on the file and all should be well.

Step 3. Upload Flatpress files to your website

screenone.jpg
Once the package is opened a folder should pop up called, surprisingly, flatpress. Using your FTP program of choice (I use Fetch but there’s a ton out there) place this folder in your public folder - or in my case, to make my life easier I created a new folder called blog and placed the contents of the flatpress folder in there.

Step 4. Set up Flatpress

Next you need to set this baby up, so what you want to do is to make sure the folder fp-content should have “777” permissions. What?!?!
permissions.jpg All that means is that in the permissions for the folder fp-content, all the check boxes should be checked.

Next the easy part:

Once that’s done you need to go through the setup. To do this you need to type in your domain/flatpress. i.e. http://www.mydomain.com/flatpress. This is pretty straight forward, there’s only 3 steps:

  1. Welcome dialogue
  2. Enter user name, password (these you give yourself to login to your site so just make something up that you’ll remember and is pretty secure), URL and e-mail address
  3. Provided, setup was successful, you are then asked whether you want to login or view your blog.

Make sure, for security reasons, that you delete the folder setup and the file setup.php once you have your blog up and running

And that’s it!

Your done - unless you want a theme or have it match your site.
I’ll go into that in detail in a future post.