Permalinks and web hosting changes!

I just spent the last two days going back over my posts to make sure that the permalinks were working correctly! I also found how to get the blog to come up under my hosting name without the Wordpress sub-directory showing in the address bar. The latter was super easy! Go-daddy had set up Wordpress for me so I didn’t have to worry about the really geeky part of that. They even had a work in progress/under construction type home page set up for me. I noticed that when I logged into Wordpress my blog showed up as being in the Wordpress sub-directory. That’s cool but it’s not how the big boys appear online!

First, the hosting changes

First I went to the General option under  Settings in my WP administrative account {The Dashboard, if you will.} I then changed the the Blog address (URL) so it was directed straight to b-ricky.com. I left the WordPress address (URL) alone as that was where Go-Daddy installed the core files for me!

What I then did was FTP into my hosting account, copied the index.php and .htaccess files from the WordPress directory into the home directory of my site that I have previously changed in the Setting/General options of WP under Blog address (URL).  {your address may be different than b-ricky.com} I then edited the file index.php replacing the line “require('./wp-blog-header.php');" to "require('./wordpress/wp-blog-header.php');"

*** Save the file! ***

Log out of Wordpress and/or your blog and log back in using just your host name and it should be fine.

And now, for those Permalinks

If you have set up Permalinks, go to the Permalinks option under Settings and update your Permalinks structure. WordPress will automatically update your .htaccess file if it has the appropriate file permissions. If WordPress can’t write to your .htaccess file, it will display the new rewrite rules to you, which you should manually copy into your .htaccess file (in the same directory as the main index.php file.)

By the way, I got most of this info from the documentation which in in my present BLOGROLL  or you can just go directly to it at http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory.

Since I mentioned in the last step updating permalinks I guess that I should share some of my new found knowledge on them. Again from the Dashboard I moved to Settings/Permalinks. Wordpress seems to want to by default give your posts permalinks of “yourblogaddress.com/?p={somenumber}“. Now I don’t know where it gets the number, but it’s not very descriptive is it? Just click the Custom Structure and add “/%category%/%postname%/” {without the quotes!}.

*** Save the file! ***

Now your permalinks will be appended with the category and the name of the post! Again, you can view the documentation at http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks.

If I may, my own little disclaimer! I don’t claim to be an expert and there is a lot of information that I haven’t included in this post. I would always recommend reading the full documentation as your mileage may  vary and what works for me might not work for thou!

I had the hosting account at GoDaddy.com. It took me quite a while to learn to navigate in their Hosting Control Center. To my eyes their site is quite cluttered. Too much advertising and  many other things that I don’t or just rarely require! I much prefer Cpanel on my other hosting sites. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. I just had to spend a little extra time with it. My next mistake was trying to rush into putting too much stuff into the site without learning how to run WordPress.

Again, I had to back up and spend some time just looking around and trying to get the basics down. I see all of the people saying that blogging is easy! Well. Yea. It is but there is still a pretty good learning curve until you’re comfortable with all of the little ticks, clicks and boxes to be filled in so that the posts end up in the right category with proper permalinks {still working on that!} and such. That was what I spent part of the last month doing. I found that I had posts scattered around and it appeared that I just threw them at the blog in a shotgun pattern. I also had some growing pains with finding out how to hook my blog up with the hosting account so that it was more branded with b-ricky.com.

One of my main problems is that I don’t immediately ask for help. I much prefer to go out to Google until I find the knowledge that I need and/or reading reams of help files whether I understand them or not at the time. That may be the hard way to approach stuff but by the time that I’ve pounded my forehead flat with the palm of my hand I really understand what I’m doing with each new chore.

To sum up! Yes it’s easy but please be sure to spend enough time learning the ins and outs of your hosting account and Wordpress. It will save you a lot of frustration. Also don’t try to rush in full tilt boogie if you will. Blogging can be fun but don’t fall for someone that tells you that it doesn’t require some time and effort! So, follow along with me in this category as my skills grow and I maneuver through or around some of the obstacles.