I now am needing to learn more about PHP, MySQL, WordPress, and so on. As you may know, this site you’re now reading runs on WordPress software, which, for the most part, I’ve been happy with. But, if I want to add my own customizations or just play around with different ideas to try out on WordPress, running a test site online is not so practical (especially with the pitiful speed of my internet here in China). So, I looked into running WordPress locally on my Mac. I had to hunt down four things to install and configure: Apache, PHP, MySQL, and WordPress. I spent four to five hours downloading, installing, and troubleshooting. In the end, it wasn’t so hard, but pulling all the info together from various websites was quite time consuming. So, I spent 20 minutes this morning culling the important information and distilled how I did it into a five-page document.

You can download the pdf file here.

It sure is nice having this set up locally. It’s incredibly fast (obviously) and as easy as editing and saving files in a basic text editor.