I spent the better part of today working on a couple of things … the first was my garage. I can now not only get a car in there, but we can still make it to the fridge, Madeline’s bike, my bike, the tools, the winter supply of fire wood, and everything else we need.

The other thing is a new look and feel. I started with the idea that I was going to switch to MovableType, but I couldn’t get it to work on my host. After fighting with their tech support people via their live chat service I simply gave up — there is a blog post about that interaction for the future. You see the blog has blown up with MySQL errors twice this week so I was hoping to try out something else. After wasting too much time on that project I switched gears trying to get my database and my WP up to date and stable. It pushed me to make a bunch of changes under the hood. I also decided it was time to make a move away from the K2 world.

I’d love to know what you all think of the new theme … there are still a few issues to work out, but it is time to spend some time with the family. Please let me know what you think!

After years of foolishly working on my live blog for all types of changes I decided to take a leap of faith and install WordPress 2.x on my G5 at home to use as a development environment. I will probably do the same thing on my work MacBook Pro and abandon my local copy of MovableType since I am a WP guy. When I did the MT thing on my MBP I found some directions and ended up in the Terminal doing all sorts of things … made me uncomfortable.

I have to give a tip of the hat to my friend and colleague, Chris Millet for introducing me to MAMP … MAMP is this nice little app that gets MySQL, Apache, PHP, and the associated admin apps you need running on your Mac in no time — as a matter of fact at the click of a mouse. Just download the thing, drop it in your Applications folder, double click the MAMP app (or fire up the included widget for use under 10.4) and you are but a click away from having Apache and MySQL Server fully installed and running on your machine. From there, installing WP was a dream. Here are the basic steps I used to get it running:

1. Download MAMP
2. Install MAMP by dropping the whole folder into my Applications directory
3. Double click the widget in the MAMP directory (under 10.4.x) and it auto installed
4. Flipped the widget over and set the radio button to PHP 4 — this is done by running the mouse over the bottom of the widget to expose the little i button. Clicked Done and it flipped back over.
5. Clicked “Start Servers” and the little lights glowed green.
6. I then tried to click the “Open Start Page” button on the widget, but nothing happened … if this happens go to the next step.
7. Back in my Applications/MAMP directory, I double clicked the MAMP application and it opened.
8. In there, I clicked the “Open Start Page” button and it opened a web page for me.

At this point MAMP is running and you are ready to install WordPress. To get WordPress running you do the following:

1. Download WordPress
2. While WordPress is downloading, go back to the start page MAMP opened for you and click the link at the top for phpMyAdmin.
3. This is where you will set up a mySQL database to run WP on.
4. In the phpMyAdmin page, under the Create new database box, type in a database name … for this you can call it anything you want … I named mine local_wp … again, it can be anything.

5. Take your WordPress files and place them inside the Applications/MAMP/htdocs directory.
6. Open the wp-config-sample.php file and update it with the following (given you named your database local_wp) … the thing that threw me for the first 20 minutes or so was adding that :8889 to the DB_HOST section.
   
   
7. Rename the wp-config-sample.php to just wp-config.php and save it back in your Applications/MAMP/htdocs directory.

At this point you just need to point your browser to http://localhost:8888/wp-admin/install.php and finish out the process … from here it is as easy as can be.  So this should get you going in a few minutes with your own development environment on your machine.  Talk about a killer personal content management system! At this point, you could install all sorts of other open source PHP based stuff in the MAMP directory to try out and tweak.  I hope this helps!

As I continue my march towards a new WordPress experience you’ll have to excuse the changes around here. I am testing out the WordPress Widgets plugin and all its associated goodness. In that activity I stumbled across a three column K2 theme … for now I am digging it, what do you think?

Maybe you’ve seen the lightbox effect that has been in use around the web lately … I started exploring and was actually thinking of writing some code — but in the end, I decided to spare the world of my abilities. Who would guess it, but I came across the WordPress Lightbox effect plugin. Sort of cool, what do you think?
Just testing it out here … a while back I posted an image of the building number for my new job … click on the image below to see inside.