Setting up my blog

How I decided to start writing my own SQL Server blog Well, it’s very funny that the first post I’m publishing in my SQL Server blog does not talk about SQL Server 🙂

I’d rather tell you how this process has been and what kind of choices I’ve had to do to walk this road down to having my personal website where tell people about my SQL Server (not only, obviously) experiences.
First to say that I decided to get a bit more involved with the big SQL Server community by sharing my experiences with the product and giving back some of all the stuff I’ve learnt from numerous blogs, websites, twitter and so on.

Once the decision was taken, it was time to see how to accomplish it without dying trying. I had a look and seems like a big number of blogs rely on WordPress so I though it’s worth to give a try. I’ve got experience developing websites and custom made CMS but I did want to focus on the content and not the container, hence a customizable ready-made CMS would be a good fit for my purpose.

Then I made the mistake of mixing two different concepts, www.wordpress.org and www.wordpress.com because since they look like “the same” thing. The fact is that the possibilities they offer quite differ.

I downloaded and installed the latest version (4.3 at the time of writing) from www.wordpress.org and started doing some tests and playing with it on my localhost, and I liked the freedom of tweaking things myself as I’m seasoned enough to do it.

On the other hand, www.wordpress.com allows you to create your personal blog and host it there, for free as a subdomain of wordpress.com. That sounded good enough for me, so I chose that… Error!
The limitations are quite a few (speaking of free version) since you can only manage your website through the provided interface, no access to anything else, no custom css outside of your theme (I’d say less number of themes too) and forget about seeing your database or modify php files. Nothing of that is allowed, no ftp access, ssh access… Still good enough for someone with basic requirements, I didn’t check what the paid plans offer, true, but at that point got fed up and decided to do it in a different way.

Since I’ve got another website (www.zonaruido.com) in a private hosting, I decided to have it there.

I installed again the latest version and all was the same as I have in my localhost. Much better, ftp, ssh, phpmyadmin… all works, great!

Next post I’ll write how I customized it to display T-SQL code as in SSMS!