Below is the 5 things usually I do when I install a fresh WordPress platform.

1. Change the Default Password

When you WordPress installation precess completed, it will generate a random password and give it to you as a default password. Go to http://myblog.com/wp-login.php and use the username and password to log in into your admin panel for the first time. To change this password you can go to Users > Your Profile and scroll down until you see the password textbox. Enter your new password and input it again in the text below before you hit the Update Profile button.

2. Change the Default Username

The default username for a fresh installed WordPress is admin. During installation process WordPress never ask you for your desire username. For security reason you should change the default username. My previous post on How to Change Your Default WordPress Username will guide you to change the username to something that unique.

3. Edit Permalinks

A URL like http://myblog.com/?p=12 is poor for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). But the default WordPress articles URL is something like that. So apply a better SEO for your blog by changing the permalinks so it display something like http://myblog.com/my-first-post/

To change it, go to Setting > Permalinks. Under Common settings click the radio button infront of Custom Structure. Then enter %postname%/ in the textbox. Hit the Save Changes button to apply the change. If your .htaccess is not writable, you have to edit the file manually and copy and paste the text inside the textbox below the Save Changes button. If you are using Nginx web server follow the instruction on my previous post WordPress Permalinks on Nginx. It will guide you to configure Nginx, so that you can use SEO friendly URL on WordPress.

4. Change Theme

You can find free theme at Free Theme WordPress or you search using Google or Yahoo to find your favorite theme. But if you have a knowledge of HTML, CSS, PHP and any image and graphic manipulation software you can designed your own theme. Upload it to wp-content > themes. If you do not know where is wp-content, you can find it on the root of your WordPress installation folder. Now, activate it via Appearance > Themes.

5. Create Your First Post

Now you have your blog up and running. Its time to create your first post. Go to Post > Add New. For your first post you can introduce yourself to you reader and tell them a little bit about yourself and what you are going the share in your blog. First post is really important because its give the reader the first impression about yourself. Once you completed writing read your post, read it one more time to check if any spelling or grammar error. When you satisfied you can publish it by pressing the Publish button. But don’t forget to add category and tags for the post.

The next things to do is tell your friends, family and the world about your blog. Keep posting, enjoy your blog and watch your blog grow.

Recommended Reading

WordPress For Dummies

WordPress Entrepreneur: How To Setup, Customize & Use A WordPress Website

But if you want to use it only for your blog/website admin panel, you can always create you self-signed SSL certificate. Creating one only take a few minute and cost nothing. Let’s start with the tools required to create your self-signed SSL cert. First you should have OpenSSL installed on your Linux operating system. If you do not then refer your Linux Distro manual on how to install package or software because this will not covered by this tutorial.

Okay, open your Linux terminal and create a folder. You can select any name. But for this tutorial I create a folder name ssl using the following command.

mkdir ssl

Now type following command to create your SSL key.

openssl genrsa 1024 > mydomain.key

It will create a 1024 bit SSL key named mydomain.key on that folder. Because you don’t want everyone can read the key you should chage its permission. The following command will change the key permission to read only for root while group and other user do not have read permission or write premission.

chmod 400 host.key

Now it time to create your certificate. use the following command.

openssl req -new -x509 -nodes -sha1 -days 365 -key mydomain.key > mydomain.cert

This command will asks you to input some information related to the certificate. And the screenshot below is the example output of the command.

Ok, lets go through what input did the command asks you to key-in. The first line is your country code. If you do not know your country code you can refer ISO_3166-1_alpha-2. The second line is your State, and next is your City. In the forth line input your Organization Name, and input your Organizational Unit Name in the fifth line. The next line (Common Name) is really important, you should input your domain name here. If you use www on your domain you should input www.mydomain.com and for non-www use mydomain.com and for subdomain input the complete subdomain name e.g., subdomain.mydomain.com. The last line is your email address, just key-in your preferred email address here.

Once completed, a file named mydomain.cert will be created on the current directory. Now you have a two files on your ssl directory. You can upload it to your server and configure your server to enable ssl connection. I will not cover server configuration as I will discussed it on my next tutorial. If everything is configure properly, you can access you website by typing https://www.mydomain.com.

The only issued using self-signed SSL certificate is that your browser will display a warning about untrusted certificate. But you can always ignored this warning because you are the only one that accesses your admin area and you are the one that issued the certificate. So do not worry about untrusted certificate.

Lastly, if you have any comments or question, do not hesitate to leave a comments because I will be happy to read your comment and answer your question.

if ($host = 'www.domain.com') {
    rewrite ^/(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 permanent;
	}

Make sure you change domain.com with your own domain name and save the configuration file before you restart nginx.

Method 2
As usual, open nginx.conf and add the following configuration to the file. Don’t forget to change domain.com with your own domain.

server {
    server_name  www.domain.com;
    rewrite ^(.*) http://domain.com$1 permanent;
}

server {
    server_name  domain.com;
    Put all other web server configuration here
}

To make the change take effect you have to save the configuration file and restart nginx. Now when visitor type www.domain.com on their browser address bar it will redirect to domain.com.

Both method are simple and easy. Adding only a few lines and wah la, the jobs is done.

<?php system("uptime"); ?>

Now save the file as uptime.php and then upload the file to your server root directory. Once uploaded, open your internet browser and point it to the uptime.php by typing http://yourdomain.com/uptime.php. Change yourdomain.com with your own domain name. This script call the unix system command ‘uptime’ and display the result in html format so that it can be display on your internet browser. Below is the example result display by the script.

22:30:25 up 3 days, 17:02,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

The first column is the current time of the server (22:23:25), the server uptime is display on the second column (3 days 17 hours and 2 second) and currently the server has 1 user online, whereas the last column display the current load of the server.

Please note that this script is only work on unix compatible operating system only.

split --b=500m original part

The program will creates four files with 500 MB each. original is the file that you want to split and part is the prefix of the split files. In this example the split command will create partaa, partab, partac and partad.

If you want to restore or merge the split files use the following command

cat partaa partab partac partad > mergefiles

This will merges the four files and named the files mergefiles.