Now that Daniel's blog is finally live, I thought I'd write a few notes about how we set the whole thing up. I was kind of bewildered by the whole thing when we started out, so maybe a bit of a write up would be useful to someone else trying to do the same thing.

Getting A Domain Name

Some while back, Daniel purchased the domain name danielstarr.com. I actually don't know a whole lot about how that part of works.

Choosing Blogging Software

When Daniel mentioned to me that he wanted to start a blog, I asked him a few basic questions about what he wanted it to be able to do. He basically had two key requirements (which I paraphrase wildly here):

• The text and layout had to be tweakable to fit his particular aesthetics.
• Readers should be able to view or sort posts by categories, so that readers who were only interested in some subset of things Daniel would be posting about could quickly get to "the good stuff".

I had a third requirement, which was that whatever blogging package we chose should not be too far beyond my webgeekery skills. I'm basically a semi-skilled amateur. I can usually learn to hack things, given time, but I wanted something that would be pretty functional right out of the box, so that Daniel wouldn't have long periods of downtime while I figured out what I was doing.

In the end, I considered the following packages:

• Movable Type
• WordPress
• Blosxom
• Drupal

I spent quite a bit of time dithering over the choice of software. All the packages seemed powerful enough to do the job. I'd intended to do test installations of all of them on my Mac to try to get a feel for ease of use, but I only got as far as installing Perl and MySQL (prerequisites for most of these packages) before I got tired of installing stuff.

In the end, I picked Movable Type, for the following reasons:

• A lot of Daniel's favorite blogs use Movable Type or TypePad. This constituted a kind of existence proof that it was possible to use Movable Type to build a blog he'd be happy with.
• I knew people who used Movable Type and vouched for its ease of use.
• I knew people who used Movable Type, so I could bug my friends for tech support. (I haven't actually had to do so yet. But it's nice to know the option is there.)

(Note: While I was composing this post, Jed posted an overview of blogging/journalling systems, including several systems that I didn't consider for Daniel's blog for various reasons. A post worth checking out if you're thinking of setting up a blog and are still deciding what to use.)

Hosting

The next step was finding hosting. This was one of the most mysterious parts of the process for me, and in a lot of ways it still is. There are zillions of hosting providers out there, all with their own pricing structures and terms of service, and so on. Basically, we wanted something reliable (server outages suck) and where we could gracefully upgrade bandwidth and features as the site developed. In addition, I wanted to make sure that we went with somebody with good customer support.

I considered going the one stop shopping route and just setting up a TypePad account. I think that's probably still a good option for people who just want a blog with a minimum of setup work, but when I compared TypePad with ordinary web hosting services, I found that you can get more storage space and bandwidth for the same price if you go with a web hosting service. (Note: TypePad's blogging software is not precisely identical to Movable Type, but it seems similar enough that for my purposes I considered it to be a flavor of Movable Type.)

In the end, I went with Media Temple. Any company that claims to have backup generators sufficient to keep their servers going through a 28 day power outage has got to be serious about reliability, and any company that offers 24X7 phone support in English, Spanish, French, Polish, Russian, Czech, Mandarin, and Cantonese has got to be serious about tech support. And while we almost certainly could have gotten cheaper hosting, their prices seem quite reasonable.

To top it off, they are a Movable Type hosting partner, which means that I didn't have to install a single bit of software.

So far, I'm very happy with Media Temple. I ordered my service online, and within 20 minutes got a set of e-mails telling me that my server was set up and my software installed. Their administration tools are easy to use, and their documentation is good enough that I have not had to contact their customer support. We'll see how it goes from here.

Design and Movable Type Template Tweaking

So, once everything was installed, I had to start figuring out how to tweak the templates to get some of the look we wanted. The Movable Type templates look kind of intimidating at first, but they're really not so bad: they're just standard HTML liberally laced with special Movable Type tags, each of which basically translates to "Insert X kind of content here". Then the whole business is styled with a single CSS stylesheet.

I relied heavily on O'Reilly Press's CSS Cookbook, particularly in designing the tabbed navigation bar containing the blog's top level categories - that's basically two recipes from the cookbook munged together, with a little bit of Movable Type-specific tweaking from me. I love the CSS Cookbook.

I also love Firefox's Web Developer Extension. The ability to display the style information for any element and the ability to apply a style sheet temporarily to a page without needing to upload it to the server made it much much easier to tweak the CSS. Plus you can get all kinds of other useful information with this extension. If you develop web pages, you need this extension.

I do wish somebody would come up with something that made it as easy to preview the Movable Type template changes as it is to preview the CSS with the Web Developer Extension. Because of the way Movable Type works, every time you change a template, you need to rebuild the site in order to see the changes take effect. Rebuilding isn't difficult, and it doesn't take too long (at least not with a brand new blog with little content), but it gets old fast.

My only other complaint is that Six Apart's documentation of the Movable Type tags is a tad sketchy in places - I still don't feel like I completely understand how hierarchical categories work, for example, and that's something I'm going to need to figure out for Daniel's blog before too long. It would also be nice to see more code examples. What I'd really like to see is a "Movable Type Cookbook", along the lines of the CSS Cookbook. I did come across the very useful Learning Movable Type, which has some cool examples and tutorials. I recommend it to anyone who is learning Movable Type.

I've still got a todo list of extra bits of design I want to incorporate, but it didn't take long at all to get something together that was workable and attractive. On the whole, I'm pretty impressed with the ease of customizing Movable Type. (If "ease" can be applied to anything that requires that one be comfortable editing HTML and CSS code.)

And that's pretty much where my contribution to the blog ends, except for continuing to tweak the templates and monitoring the comment threads, ready to disemvowel unwary trolls. The rest is up to Daniel.