I love Wordpress. Don’t get me wrong.  love blogger as well. However, Blogger doesn’t give me as much freedom as Wordpress does.

I have always wanted to move to the Self-hosted version of Wordpress but I had one big pillar standing in front of me. As a matter of fact, the pillar is still there; I have not yet broken it down but I hope to manage it up until things get better.

My main problem with using wordpress.org has always been hosting. Not that I don’t want to pay for hosting. Not that I want to safe those extra 4 bucks a month. No! The main issue with me is the payment method. Until you live in some of the “technologically primitive” parts of this dark continent called Africa, you might not really understand what I mean. At times, paypal and credit cards are completely out of reach for an average citizen.

Right now, I will be going on free hosting for a couple of months before I transfer my blog to a paid hosting service. After doing some intensive search, I found two free hosts that I could rely on for a moment. Freehostia works very well with wordpress but hey have a cpu limit of 1.3%. If you start doing some intensive work on your blog like switching themes, adding plugings, customizing your theme, etc, you will consume more than that limit before you even know it. I consider 1.3% too small. Another alternative I had was 000webhost.

000webhost offers 350MB of free space. That is too small but come on, what am I doing here? That space is enough for a single wordpress blog, right? And by the way, I will be there just for a couple of months. They also offer 100GB bandwidth, email, 2 MYSQL databases, a very good CPanel…etc. The main problem is that they have too many limitations which I am yet to pinpoint, so I have to do everything manually. That is time consuming.

The main change one can spot here is the theme. The theme I was using was the Blogger version of the wordpress polaroid theme converted by eblogtemplates. When I switched to wordpress, I thought I will just download the original wordpress version and use it. Oh my! The wordpress version is a lot different. I could not customize the sidebars. However, I could not let it go because I love the header too much.  I therefore had to hack the Box-tube wordpress theme I installed on Noela’s blog and replace its header with that of the polaroid theme. This is what I got. This theme is a blend of the both the Box-tube and the Polaroid. What should I call this? The polaroid box? :d Alongside the blending, I also did some small changes; added google ad links at the top of the header, reserved the left and right side of the header for both free advertising (for my sponsors) and paid advertising (project wonderful) and also replaced the sidebar header image with a custom image carry my logo and photo. Entrecard? Come on! The space on top of the sidebar is for her and just her alone!

Oh! I thought you will never ask. The messages? I have reserved the middle part of the header for some inspirational, motivational and funny messages. You know, Blogging is not all only about Blogging. I collected the quotes from CoolQuotes.com and used the FastStone Image Capture and Viewer to transform them to png images and uploaded to a directory on my server.  A script on the polaroid theme constantly rotates the images. I don’t know exactly how, but each visitor is supposed to see a single image carrying a message on it. I hope you find the messages useful.

I am not yet done with the entire set up. I still have to do some tweaks and and add some plugins especially for commenting. I am still trying to get commentluv and popularity contest to work. I want to setup dofollow and also use keywordluv to give my commenters some link juice.

By the end of the day, I will be done with the tweaks and will inform you of any changes I make.

Thanks for the read…

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