Hardware routers come in all sorts of shapes, sizes, default administrative IPs, and port-forwarding configurations. You’ll want to consult your router’s manual as to the specific way to configure your device for port forwarding, but in general, it’s pretty similar to how you set up your software firewall.
You’ll have to enter a particular IP address into your browser to access your router’s configuration screen (usually it’s 192.168.0.1), and somewhere in there will be a menu for port forwarding. Type in the static IP address you just configured for your PC in the Windows network settings (our example was 192.168.0.2), and forward the TCP ports 80, 443, and 3306 to that IP.
Now that you’re done playing with IPs, you should hit up DynDNS and register for its free static DNS service. Download and run the site’s update client, and your DynDNS web address (e.g., example.is-a-chef.org) will always point to the IP address of your router, which will forward the traffic requests right to your web server.
After all that networking configuration, installing the server applications themselves is a piece of cake. In just three clicks of the default Next button, XAMPP will unload the big guns—Apache, MySQL, and PHP—onto your system. While it’s chugging along, go get a drink or something; on an average machine, the installation takes about five minutes or so. Be sure to install the XAMPP components as Windows services when prompted.
Once that’s done, pull up your web browser and point it to http://localhost. Select your language, and you’ll find yourself on the XAMPP main screen. Click Status, and if everything installed correctly, the top five components—at minimum—will be green-lit. Now click the Security link in the left-hand frame, and you’ll find that your XAMPP setup lacks any password-based security whatsoever. Click the link below the table, and you’ll be given the option to password-lock your MySQL root and XAMPP configuration. Double-click the tray icon, restart MySQL, and you’re set.
Unzip the WordPress files to your /htdocs directory, a subset of wherever you installed XAMPP. While that’s happening, fire up the XAMPP main screen in your browser and click phpMyAdmin under the Tools menu. Once you’ve logged in, look for the Create New Database prompt. Then type wordpress, and select “utf8_unicode_ci” instead of “collation.”
Head over to your /htdocs directory, and pull up “wp-config-sample.php” in Wordpad. Type in your MySQL username (root) and password, then save the file and rename it wp-config.php. Go back to http://localhost in your browser, where you’ll get a prompt to auto-install WordPress. When it finishes, log into your new WordPress installation and click the Options tab. Under WordPress Address, type in the URL that you’ll use to access your blog, which is usually the same as your DynDNS Internet address. Most people will put the same info in the Blog Address field as well.
By now, WordPress is basically good to go, but you don’t want a default-looking blog; you want a fancy blog. In that case, we recommend you grab K2 (getk2.com), a template that goes on top of your WordPress installation and adds a bunch of advanced functionality. The easy part comes on the installation side; just unzip the K2 package to your /wp-content/themes/ directory. Point your browser to your WordPress configuration page (wp-admin), click the Presentation tab, and select K2 as your current theme.
From there, you can hit up the K2 Options Panel to set the theme, or overall look of your blog, and manage the specifics of your blog’s header and sidebar modules. If you’re really adventurous, you can edit your site’s CSS templates directly. But one of the nice things about K2 is that it eliminates the need to get elbow-deep in code, especially when you want to install new K2-compatible plugins. With one quick download and a few clicks of the mouse, you can throw just about any added functionality you want into your blog
You’ll have to enter a particular IP address into your browser to access your router’s configuration screen (usually it’s 192.168.0.1), and somewhere in there will be a menu for port forwarding. Type in the static IP address you just configured for your PC in the Windows network settings (our example was 192.168.0.2), and forward the TCP ports 80, 443, and 3306 to that IP.
Now that you’re done playing with IPs, you should hit up DynDNS and register for its free static DNS service. Download and run the site’s update client, and your DynDNS web address (e.g., example.is-a-chef.org) will always point to the IP address of your router, which will forward the traffic requests right to your web server.
After all that networking configuration, installing the server applications themselves is a piece of cake. In just three clicks of the default Next button, XAMPP will unload the big guns—Apache, MySQL, and PHP—onto your system. While it’s chugging along, go get a drink or something; on an average machine, the installation takes about five minutes or so. Be sure to install the XAMPP components as Windows services when prompted.
Once that’s done, pull up your web browser and point it to http://localhost. Select your language, and you’ll find yourself on the XAMPP main screen. Click Status, and if everything installed correctly, the top five components—at minimum—will be green-lit. Now click the Security link in the left-hand frame, and you’ll find that your XAMPP setup lacks any password-based security whatsoever. Click the link below the table, and you’ll be given the option to password-lock your MySQL root and XAMPP configuration. Double-click the tray icon, restart MySQL, and you’re set.
Unzip the WordPress files to your /htdocs directory, a subset of wherever you installed XAMPP. While that’s happening, fire up the XAMPP main screen in your browser and click phpMyAdmin under the Tools menu. Once you’ve logged in, look for the Create New Database prompt. Then type wordpress, and select “utf8_unicode_ci” instead of “collation.”
Head over to your /htdocs directory, and pull up “wp-config-sample.php” in Wordpad. Type in your MySQL username (root) and password, then save the file and rename it wp-config.php. Go back to http://localhost in your browser, where you’ll get a prompt to auto-install WordPress. When it finishes, log into your new WordPress installation and click the Options tab. Under WordPress Address, type in the URL that you’ll use to access your blog, which is usually the same as your DynDNS Internet address. Most people will put the same info in the Blog Address field as well.
By now, WordPress is basically good to go, but you don’t want a default-looking blog; you want a fancy blog. In that case, we recommend you grab K2 (getk2.com), a template that goes on top of your WordPress installation and adds a bunch of advanced functionality. The easy part comes on the installation side; just unzip the K2 package to your /wp-content/themes/ directory. Point your browser to your WordPress configuration page (wp-admin), click the Presentation tab, and select K2 as your current theme.
From there, you can hit up the K2 Options Panel to set the theme, or overall look of your blog, and manage the specifics of your blog’s header and sidebar modules. If you’re really adventurous, you can edit your site’s CSS templates directly. But one of the nice things about K2 is that it eliminates the need to get elbow-deep in code, especially when you want to install new K2-compatible plugins. With one quick download and a few clicks of the mouse, you can throw just about any added functionality you want into your blog
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
