I am a huge fan of WordPress, and have used it here on my site (ruthstalkerfirth.com) and offline since 2007.
In my new Udemy course: Human-computer interaction, I talk about WordPress, as an example of a social media platform, invented so that people could easily blog online without having to learn to code; and as an open source business model which demonstrates the volunteer’s dilemma, game theory for social media.
Offline, I use WordPress as a diary, my handwriting has always been difficult to decipher even for me, so it’s much easier and faster for me to type and understand what I have written. I do love thinking and doodling on paper, but having an electronic journal locally has been so useful to find old notes and ideas really easily.
I use wamp to manage all my php and mysql needs as I test out new themes and plugins and occasionally blog about them as I did back in 2011, so that I can remember what I have done.
This blog contains over 200,000 words and for about four years now I have been threatening to turn them into book. I had some analysis-paralysis about the best way to do this, but now I have decided. I will carve up the blog and make a smallish book about on human-computer interaction to accompany the udemy course, and then all the words that are left over will go into a new project, yet to be named, but it’s fizzing away in the back of my brain and I am very excited about it.
This means that I want a local copy of my website next to my electronic journal, so that I can access it without an Internet connection. However, the last time I wanted two separate blogs was in 2008 and the only way to do it was to set up two WordPress installations.
Yesterday, I was expecting to do the same, and spent ages messing about with myphpadmin and mysql deleting and adding databases and trying to make that link up with WordPress, without success. Thankfully WordPress, amazing as always, has moved on and so I did it really quickly this morning.
This is how:
I flagged up the WordPress Multisite option using one line in wp-config.php file
define(‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true);
after reading this tutorial on themeilse.com.
That one line displayed up the multisite Tools->Networking options in the WordPress dashboard and so I set up another site on my localhost called blogcopy.
Following this tutorial on athemeart.com, I was able to export my WordPress blog via the export options on the dashboard (I had to do it in sections as it was too big to do in one go) and then import it into my blogcopy second site on my localhost. At no point did I need to go via the cpanel>myphpadmin route to drop or create databases which made is so easy and quick.
And, now I am ready to begin my new book on human-computer interaction, using all of the words and the research I have here, starting with my 101 blogs, though if you dig about you will see that there’s more that 101, I just wanted a catchy title and so I dropped a few links.
Wish my luck with my new book, oooh, it rhymes, I like it!
