I’m happy to announce that not only am I picking up blogging again, I’m doing it from a host I’m much happier with~ PikaPods is a host for all sorts of open-source Web apps, and while they take care of all the updates, database administration, etc. for you, they also give you most of the flexibility you would want from self-hosting those apps – for WordPress in particular, that means full access to your plugins and themes folders! I already have a child theme of Nucleare set up, and I’m free to reshape it however I like, mweeheehee~
Setting up WordPress on PikaPods was mostly a matter of hitting “Add Pod”, selecting WordPress, then completing WordPress’s short setup form, but there are a few things PikaPods doesn’t set up for you. The rest of this post is about how I arrived at what I’d consider a fully-featured WordPress install.
- WordPress came with an anti-spam plugin preinstalled but inactive; I had to manually turn it on from the Plugins page in WordPress’s admin interface. This requires a pay-what-you-want subscription to Akismet; you’re allowed to choose $0 if your blog is noncommercial.
- PikaPods does not provide pods the ability to send e-mail; this means e.g. if you want to hold back comments until you manually approve them, by default WordPress can’t notify you about them. PikaPods has documentation about this including recommendations for 3rd-party services you can use. Once you’ve signed up for one of them, you can go to Plugins > Add New Plugin in WordPress, and search for a plugin to connect WordPress to that service. I already had Mailgun, and installed Post SMTP.
- WordPress’s default post editor & widget manager these days are barely-usable abominations, but thankfully there are plugins to put the old ones back, and they’re fully compatible with any other plugins that extended the old systems.