by Adam Pash

Click to viewIf you want to host your own blog, you can purchase a plan at a web hosting provider for a few bucks a month - or you can set it up on your home computer for free.


Weblogs, as most people know them, are web sites made of individual entries of various length, by any number of authors, organized in reverse chronological order. Of course, you know what a blog is - you read Lifehacker, and if you don't already have a blog of your own, you know someone who does.


The cool thing about blogs (and many other web apps, like wikis) is that they don't actually have to live online. A blog can live on your personal computer or somewhere on your network; you can use it as a private journal or as the main conduit for intracompany communication. Or maybe you just want to keep all of your personal data, blog posts included, on your own computer and not on Google's servers. Whatever the reason may be, setting up and hosting a blog on your personal computer is a painless process. Today we'll set up a weblog on your Windows PC using the popular open source blogging software, WordPress.

Note: WordPress is a full-featured, excellent piece of open source blogging software. In order to run it on your computer, you'll need to install an Apache web server, the PHP scripting language, and a MySQL database server. Although setting all of this up is not difficult (the process is detailed below), you can easily avoid the whole shebang and get your own free hosted weblog somewhere like WordPress or Blogger if those sites fit your needs. If you're aware of the alternatives, but you're determined (for whatever reason) to run a blog on your own computer, read on.


I've put together a step-by-step guide (7 steps in all) for installing WordPress and all the tools necessary to host it locally, so if you're ready to get blogging, click here (or the image above) to get started.

Note (part the second): Our gallery tool is a bit - erm - quirky at the moment, so to advance from one step to the next, click the link at the end of each description. You can try clicking on the thumbnails to progress, but chances are that doing so will leave you confused.


Getting good with WordPress

Now that you've got WordPress installed on your local computer, you've got a lot of options. If you want to make your blog accessible to the outside world, see:

Keep in mind that you wouldn't be able to run a heavily trafficked blog from your home computer, but if it's just a personal blog for friends and family, hosting it yourself is definitely an option (your service provider may not be into the idea, so you may want to check your ToS).


To get familiar with and tweak your WordPress blog, check out our WordPress tag, specifically:

Got your own blog? Weigh in on how you use it. Got a WordPress blog? Let us hear your favorite plugins, templates, and tweaks. All this and more in the comments.


Adam Pash is an associate editor for Lifehacker with a thing for hosting web apps for personal use on his home computer. His special feature Hack Attack appears every Tuesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader.