I recently made a video on how to install Wordpress using the fantastico tool within cpanel. Then I made a second video on how to install wordpress manually.

Conclusion?

Hopefully, everybody has access to cpanel and fantastico for installing wordpress. It’s the easiest and fastest way to install wordpress on your own server.

People ask me all the time if it’s better to have a free blogspot.com or wordpress.com than having a self-hosted wordpress installed.

Here’s my take on it…

If you’re just starting out and never had a blog before, I’d suggest you start by creating a blogspot.com blog as it’s the easiest and fastest way to start a blog.  You can literally be blogging within 5 minutes.

I recently started a couple of blogger blogs myself to see if Google gives more love to it’s own blog platform…:-)

The problem with free blogs is that the owner of the blog platform has control over your blog.  I’ve heard horror stories about blogger blogs suddenly disappearing.  So, as soon as you feel experienced enough, I’d suggest you move into a self-hosted wordpress blog.

With a self-hosted blog like wordpress you have complete control over the blog, although it can require a bit more technical knowledge to install and maintain.  There is also a small cost involved for hosting.  But in reality, the technical knowledge and the cost required  are minimal.

So here’s the video on how to install wordpress using fantastico…

…and here’s Part I of how to install wordpress manually…

…and here’s Part II of how to install wordpress manually…

Good luck with your blog!

~M

I’ve been recently playing with changing themes on my Wordpress blog and I kid you not I probably installed more than 10 themes in my attempt to find the perfect one.

I finally realized the futility of all this and decided to settle on the Thesis Theme which is a premium theme.  Premium just means I had to pay for it.

Well, I proudly installed my new Thesis Theme and when I went to Appearance>Widgets to add my Archives and Recent Posts to my sidebar lo and behold these widgets were showing as though they were already installed in my sidebar.  The “Add” option was not available…even though the widgets were NOT present in my sidebars.

I just couldn’t figure it out so off I go to the Thesis support forum (really cool btw) and post a question about my problem.

After receiving a couple of answers from some very nice fellows it looked like the problem was related to all those theme changes I performed on my blog.

Basically, this problem can happen when you have a theme using 2 sidebars and then change back to a theme with only sidebar.

It was suggested I reinstall my previous theme, delete all widgets from it then uninstall it and reinstall my thesis theme.

Unfortunately, that didn’t work but after much googling I stumbled upon a plugin that lets you uninstall ALL your widgets.

That did work like a charm and I finally had access to all my widgets within my Thesis Theme.

The plugin is called widgets-reset.

If you need to use the plugin just make sure you take a backup of any code you might have in your Text plugins as this will really reset all plugins all data in them will be lost.

Cheers!

~Michel