I am currently working on starting another blog to keep a friend of mine busy writing online. The blog will cover television and everything in that sphere, and is called TV Gawker. As I am sure you can guess, TV Watcher was already taken.

The first step I took in setting up the site was to download my favourite blog software WordPress, which I transferred onto my server using Subversion, a system that will allow me to easily upgrade the blog as each new version is released.

WordPress is simple and effective blogging software, and while it doesn’t easily support multiple blog set-ups, I have found it easy to work with and partnered with Subversion, it handles my needs quite well.

Setting up WordPress isn’t all that difficult. I turn off the visual editor, change my password, fill out my profile, and then move to the settings pages to make sure everything looks correct. I change the permalinks to something more “human” and I usually change the category prefix to a keyword in hopes of helping the sites SEO.

I haven’t gone back and installed all of the plugins I like using, but I will be doing that soon. Choosing and configuring them take much more time than pretty much any other step.

I chose the Tarski theme for TV Gawker because I love it, and have for a long time. I will probably be using it as the basis for all of the blogs in my little network going forward, once I customize it for each site.

Once the user information, settings, and design are taken care of, I delete the introductory post that all WordPress blogs start with and then create the main category set I want the blog to use. On a blog like TV Gawker, which will be covering such a wide niche, the category list was quite long, but putting commas between categories made quick work of adding them all.

Once I have WordPress set up, it is all about generating content, and thankfully I have a great friend of mine taking care of the majority of that.

The next step will be to set up all of the WordPress plugins that the site needs, and then work on creating some pillar articles which I can promote in the social network world. Then I will be working on gaining inbound links, and finally, finding ways to monetize the site. Keep watching back for more as I document loosely the process of launching TV Gawker from nothing, into hopefully gaining an audience of around a ten thousand page views a day.

Originally posted on June 5, 2008 @ 5:19 pm