Week 1 is about building the foundation needed for the program. This week is not very exciting but very necessary.  First I needed hosting and a domain name for a website.  The recommended hosting service is D9.  I am not familiar with D9 but it doesn’t matter.  I already have hosting with HostGator so I am going to use that.  I got the hosting a couple of months ago but could never figure out what I wanted to do with it.  For a domain name, your name.com is recommended if available.  Bob Caine.com was available so I purchased it and bobcaine.com was born almost.

When I originally got my HostGator account I purchased the smallest package available which only handles a single domain.  Now I had to upgrade my hosting to allow multiple domains.  There was about a 36 hour delay before I could activate bobcaine.com.  After the delay, activating my new domain was a piece-of-cake.  When I was doing my research for hosting and domain registration, I read that for security reasons your hosting and domain should not be purchased from the same place.  This also saves some money but makes connecting the two a little more complicated.  I had already done this once, so, no problem the the second time.

The domain is up and running.   I created a directory called “blog” and installed WordPress in that directory.  John provided instructions to accomplish these tasks.  I watched his instructions but modified them because I was using a different hosting service.  On HostGator, installing WordPress requires clicking an icon and in a few seconds installation is complete.  I am really curious why WordPress is installed in the blog directory and not the home directory.  I am sure I will find out eventually.

Now, we suppose to create our first post.  I had used WordPress (WP) before so between the video instructions and previous knowledge this was not a problem.  You can read my first post, Hello World, by clicking on the name.  The last task in week 1 was setting up an email account.  You can now contact me at bob@bobcaine.com.