I’ve started my own Blog server. After looking at several different open source servers, I ran across this review.
http://www.asymptomatic.net/blogbreakdown.htm
The review had many more titles than I had looked at. The bottom line was the same. They recommended WordPress and that’s the way I was leaning as well.
So I downloaded WordPress
The product requires two pre-installed components – PHP and MySQL. Since almost everything uses these two components, I already had them installed. All I had to do was create the MySQL table for WordPress (the instructions in the docs outlined the whole process). Five minutes later, I had a blog server.
Everything worked just as advertised except for the file upload. I needed to change the folder permissions on my server to allow the anonymous user account write access to the upload folder. That didn’t really surprise me.
I’m still testing everything out to make sure it works the way I want it to. Once I’m sure it’s secure, I’ll open it up to the outside world