Last week was an art week, so this week is a content week. The big item of content still unaccounted for is the blog, so I went to work on that today. I went for Wordpress, of course, since it's a free and versatile tool written in PHP, which I already know works on my site. But I soon discovered that installing Wordpress requires a MySQL database to be set up. Okay, how does that work? Well -- said the Wordpress instructions -- you set up a database using the database client provided by your host, like CPanel or PHPMyAdmin. Er... come again?
So yeah, it turns out that real hosting companies give their customers a set of standardized tools that allow built-in management of things like databases. A friend with a website of her own was even nice enough to let me log into her site's CPanel interface so that I could poke around. It's neat, it's exactly what I need, and as far as I can tell it's completely absent from USF student webspace. I tried to be clever and manually install PHPMyAdmin, but I got "access denied" on ten files related to importing and exporting. USF is being cautious about what it lets its students put on its servers. Tomorrow I will call tech support, and if they can't help me I will pay for the hosting I need to give my website the features I want!
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