WordPress and Google Apps

Today I decided to start a new blog, about something completely different than this one, http://everydaytrainblog.com/. So I thought to myself why not try something different than blogger? Without any googling, for some reason, WordPress came to mind. So I gave it a go. I didn't know anything about it. I had only heard of it.

One important disambiguation is the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. WordPress.org is the WordPress software itself which you can download/modify and install on your own server. On the other hand, WordPress.com is a free managed hosting for WordPress blogs. WordPress.com limits functionality, mostly for security/scalability purposes. I had already registered and created a blog with WP.com before I even knew about this difference. In any case I needed hosting and something with zero management overhead. So I had made the right decision without knowing.

Registration and blog creation was very easy. The interface is very web2.0-ish but not very ajax-ish, yet still usable. It didn't take me too long to figure out the basics of the dashboard, postings and pages. And I was up and running very quickly. For comparison between WordPress and Blogger there are plenty of artciles around. And there is many other great blogging software/eware out there.

Next thing I needed to do was to get my own domain name running with my wordpress blog. I bought the domain name through WordPress itself. It costs $15/year to do this. $5 for domain registration and $10 for them to map the domain to your blog. You pay through paypal. You actually buy wordpress credits and then with them you buy the domain/mapping. Pretty straight forward and not many forms to fill in. My wordpress blog was running on my domain name in minutes.

Since I wasn't happy enough with this, I wanted to set up my own email address at my new domain. i.e. patrick@my-new-domain-name.com. It turns out that to do this, you need to use Google Apps. Google Apps allows companies (anyone really) to use set up google applications on the company's domain, for employees of the company to use for free. So for example, my company can use the online GMail software for its email infrastructure. My employees will have their email address on the companies domain, eg. employee1@mycompany.com, but they will use the GMail online client to manage their email (I wish we had this where I work, instead of Outlook!). Similarly, my employees can manage/maintain my company's documents using Google Docs, on my company's domain. It's a bit like a hosted intranet. Note: it is still all hosted on google's reliable infrastructure. Not many companies are willing to host their services and even moreso their data on a 3rd party infrastructure.

So anyways I had to register and validate my-new-domain-name with Google Apps, which was also very quick and simple. And then tell WordPress to link the two. It's all explained here.

So now I got a new mail address at my new domain that I bought through and use for WordPress, and for which I use Gmail/Google Apps to manage the email. Rather confusing to put it like that! But it works :)