I’ve been trying to decide on some side projects to tackle while looking for work and figured learning to set up a WordPress blog would be a pretty good place to start. While it’s pretty old tech that isn’t as trendy as substack and so on, I liked the idea of something that was battle-tested, still sees a decent amount of use, and that I could host entirely on my own.
I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to get everything set up; I already had a DigitalOcean droplet for my personal website and I’d figured out stuff like DNS and basic nginx configuration for doing a simple HTML site, so making adjustments to be able to host a WordPress blog was a good way to reinforce the knowledge I already had while building on some new skills.
I followed this really good tutorial that laid the steps out in a nice accessible format while also doing a good job of providing context for why various steps were being taken.
Being able to leave a lot of the installation details to the WordPress CLI tool was great, though I am a bit curious what it’s like to do all that manually and how much of WordPress is just ready to go out of the box. But it’s a hard sell to go back and do it the hard way once I’ve had a taste of just firing off a few CLI items and getting a site running.
Of course there’s still plenty of stuff I want to mess with; customizing the behavior and look of this would be nice to avoid it feeling quite so generic, but it’s cool that something simple can be brought up so quickly and easily. If I run into interesting problems along the way I’ll try to document them here.