Creating your own Photoblog with PixelPost
Posted on November 9th 2008
Yes, creating your own photo blog is possible these days and it’s not that difficult. There are multiple platforms out there which allow you to easily manage your photo blog and insert pictures with a few clicks. Today I will cover the one called PixelPost.
Most of the photo blogs listed on this site are using PixelPost. As mentioned on their website, PixelPost is an open-source, standards-compliant, multi-lingual, fully extensible photo blog application for the web. Yeah, just that! It is actually really powerful. The only requirements to run PixelPost are the following:
- PHP 4.3 or greater (w/ GD-lib)
- MySQL 3.23.58 or greater
Basically if you already have a hosting account and it is not supporting these feature, get a refund and go somewhere else. These 2 requirements should be the minimum features on your host.
Once you got your host, you simply need to download the PixelPost package from their home page and upload it to your hosting directory via FTP. If you have never used ftp client before, here is a nice open source FTP client I like to use: FileZilla.
Next step is to create a database on your hosting server to capture all the information that will be pulled out by the PixelPost engine. Refer to your hosting support for database creation; usually it is pretty straight forward.
Now, you are ready to configure PixelPost. Open the web browser and go to the following address:
www.example.com/(photoblog_foldername)/admin/install.php
Here you go, simply follow the steps and your first photo blog will be up and running!!
Check out the following link for more detailed information about PixelPost installation:
http://www.pixelpost.org/docs/GettingStarted/Install
Next time we will go through the customization of Wordpress to make it a real photo blog!
