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.