Arif Blog عارف بلاگ A bilingual blog, which carries news, views, information etc, all in simple Enligsh and Urdu.

My plans: A guide to self-installed WP blog

I am planning to write a guidline on how to setup a wordpress blog with free hosting site. The guideline would include:

In short, I wish to enable everybody create a blog like this one, within few hours and without spending days to figure out how English and Urdu could walk abreast on your blog in a sophisticated way.

Should I write this guide in Urdu or English? tell me.

The Beginning

This is my first post at my new blog here. Previously I held a blog at the blogsome.com.
They people allow a lot of customization of their themes, via smarty-tags but it was not enough for me. I wanted a full control over themes and plugins and no free blog hosting service provide this facility, as far I know.

I faced my biggest blogging challenge when I tried to write pots in Urdu and English. I had customized my theme for Urdu and it displayed urdu posts in excellent manner but when it came to English, Urdu customized theme, espacially its Urdu fonts, defaced them. I had to switch back to the default setting of my theme, now Engilsh posts would look good but those written in Urdu were miserable.

So I setup this blog by registering for free web-space at ueuo.com and serving myself as web-master. (I did not charge me any fee to keep the blog absolutely free). As you can see this posts in written in Urdu and English and both languages appears fine; English and Urdu paragraphs have "Verdana" and "Urdu Naksh Asiatype" fonts respectively.

My blog at the blogsome.com was titled as اک فسانہ زندگی and it still lies there. I had started that blog using an alias of Kirdar ( meaning character in Urdu), thinking that anonymity would enable me to write great things, without any risk. Besides, at that time, I considered the Internet an unsuitable place to disclose one's full identity. But time has changed my belief, now I feel comfortable being a part of this global village.

However, I am unable to import my posts from اک فسانہ زندگی to this blog. Blogsome.com has no option to export posts, unlike the wordpress.com, which offers this feature.

یہاں پر یہ میرا نیا بلاگ ہے۔ اس سے پہلے میں‌ نے بلاگ سم پر ایک بلاگ بنایا تھا۔ بلاگ سم والوں نے اپنی تھیمز میں تبدیلی کے لیے کافی‌ سہولت دے رکھی تھی لیکن میں‌ مطمئن نہیں‌ ہوسکا۔ مجھے تھیمز اور پلگ انز پر مکمل کنٹرول چاہئے تھا اور جہاں‌ میں جانتا ہوں، مفت بلاگ ہوسٹنگ فراہم کرنے والا کوئی ادارہ یہ سہولت فراہم نہیں کرتا۔ لہٰذا میں‌ نے فری ویب اسپیس کے لیے رجسٹر ہوکر یہ بلاگ تیار کیا ہے۔