I chose WordPress for my blog because I have been reading many articles that suggested that its clean lines, SEO compatibility, that I have done a lot with PHP and it had a 5 minute install. 

As it turns out - if you are using a shared hosting solution; which is cheap and cheerful and is using apache; want to interact with different automatic blog posters (Windows Live Writer, Word, Firefox Add-ins); still want to have some blog security; want to not be spammed after 5 minutes; and have no idea what you are doing then you may have all sorts of 404 and 403 errors happening at random intervals frustrating your desire to sit down and blog. In fact, between working, studying and going to tech-ed 2007 it took me two weeks to get something passable as a blog.

I will not go into all the numerous problems that I encountered and the time I spent searching, nor the extensions you can install (which will be the subject of another post) - I have been able to avoid any of them with the below steps. 

For Those People, I have two suggestions on how to get a good looking, working  blog in the times it takes to watch an episode of the Simpsons. 

Option 1

1.    Go to  http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress and find a copy of the most recent WordPress zip to download

2.    Download it

3.    Unzip it

4.    Create a file called .htaccess and save it in the root folder where you just unzipped wordpress

5.    Edit this file and include the following lines:

# BEGIN Andrew
<Files index-extra.php>
    SecFilterInheritance Off
</Files>
# END Andrew

# BEGIN KillCrappyModSec
<IfModule mod_security.c>
SecFilterInheritance Off
</IfModule>
# END KillCrappyModSec

6.    Then Save this file - if you want to you can change any of the text after the # because these are just comments.

7.    Upload everything in the WordPress directory to the web server

8.    Change the permissions of every single file to 0644 and all the folders to 0755

9.    Activate the Akismet Plugin

10.  Register for an Akismet API Key

11.  Download a new theme

12.  Extract your new theme

13.  Go to your blog - and through presentation, use this new theme

At this stage you are ready to go; however I would recommend that you  customise the theme yourself - and also if you want to use windows live writer - do not use the Bad Behaviour plugin, this is supposedly configurable but every change I tried making to it to allow the remote access killed it.

Option 2

This is the preferred option for those who do not trust other people to interfere with your web setup, or those who are not as arrogant as I am and are not worried that it will reflect badly on their technical skills by asking someone to help them.

1. Go To:  WordPress Install4Free (http://install4free.wordpress.net) and request them to install it for you

Then install and follow the advice from step 9 above