Consider this a “I’ve just set up my blog!” token post, that however old and experienced I get I can never resist writing, despite the fact that these kind of entries rarely contain any useful information at all.

Setting up WordPress was less straightforward than I’d imaged (or hoped), although I suspect this was mainly due to MySQL not liking two character user names. Shame it didn’t tell me that.

Other random installation notes:

• WordPress doesn’t let you specify your name during the install, so unless you want all your subsequent blog posts to be posted by ‘admin’ then you have to create a new user straight away. This takes more clicks than necessary.
• Version 2.0 is still a bit buggy, it seems. As it suggested, I deleted the existing ‘Hello World’ post that had been created as part of the installation without any problems. Then I came to delete the orphaned comment that seemed to have left behind, but it seemed it just hadn’t bothered updating the screen. I got a really nasty error about there not being a post with that ID and had to click the back button. Gah.

Wrapping WordPress in a PHP container that can automatically create new blogs and populate them with sensibly-named users, etc. is definitely something that needs doing. That should make the installation process at least less painful. Or we can wait for version three :-).