Using a thumbdrive as a journal

We often get pulled back and forth between projects. Sometimes we find it hard to remember what we were doing last. Our thumbdrive journal gives us an instant “tickler” file that can be searched. Tagging our individual posts makes this even easier to find our last task. Of course, you could use this method to keep a diary or just simple organized notes. We do all of our work on Windows based computers, but you can follow the same steps to create a thumbdrive journal on Linux or Apple computers.

To get started you will need to following resources.

1. WordPress - this is the blogging software that you will install on your thumbdrive
2. Thumbdrive – you don’t need a huge drive for this purpose. 1 gig is plenty but more will not hurt
3. XAMPP - your web server. Alternatively you can use UniformServer, but for this tutorial we will cover XAMPP

That’s it!

Downloading software:

Simply download the latest release of WordPress from their web site using the link provided above. The default zip file is just fine. When downloading XAMPP, you will want to choose the ‘lite’ version. This requires a manual install but this does not make installing the software more difficult.

Installing the software:

1. Copy XAMPP to your thumbdrive
2. Copy WordPress to your thumbdrive

Wordpress depends on the web server so we need to install this first. The only difference between the exe and zip file for the lite version is the exe version will run the setup batch file after it finishes copying files. In our case, you DO NOT want to run the setup. So all we need to do for XAMPP, is to unzip the files onto the root of our thumbdrive.

By root, I mean that you should have xampp directory directly after your drive letter. DO NOT create a directory.

For example: (replace i with your thumbdrive drive letter)
i:\xampplite (correct)
i:\journal\xampplite (incorrect)

Depending on your file, the folder inside of the zip may be called xampp or xampplite. This does not matter, either is fine.

To install WordPress, we follow the same steps. We simply unzip the file into the htdocs directory. In our case we also made a subfolder called journal. This isn’t necessary but allows us to have more web sites or applications using our web server in the future. When you are done, it should look like this.

Configuration:

1. Start Apache (the web server)
2. Start MySQL
3. Create a database for WordPress
4. Create a new database user
5. Give new database user full rights to the database for WordPress
6. Edit Wordpress Config file
7. Run install file for WordPress via web browser

Now to start using the products, we will need to start the web server and database server. We do this by double clicking on apache_start.bat and mysql_start.bat. Alternatively, you can launch the xampp_control.exe which will open a console window that will allow you to start the two servers.

Next open your web browser and go to http://localhost. This should redirect to the following page.

We need to create a database for WordPress. To do this, click on phpMyAdmin in the bottom left of the page. When prompted for a login, you will login with the user ‘root’ and a blank password. If this doesn’t work, check the readme file in the root folder of the xampp install. This should have your login information. Next create a database. We chose journal as the name of our database. The name is not important as long as you remember what you named it.

While still in phpMyAdmin, create a user for your new database. Go back to the main page and click on the Privileges tab at the top. You can get back to the main page by clicking on the text link that shows localhost at the top of the page. About half way down the page you will see a link for adding a new user. Here is the information we used. You can change the user and password to whatever you would like as long as you remember it.

User: wpadmin
Host: Localhost
Password: journal2009

Click the Go button at the bottom of the screen. When the screen refreshes, click the privileges tab again to see all of the users. To the far right of the wpadmin user, click the pencil icon. About half way down the page, there is a section for database specific privileges. From the database drop down, select the journal database. Click Check All when the screen refreshes. This will give your user full access to this database. Don’t forget to click go at the bottom right of that section.

We still need to edit the config file so WordPress will know how to connect to the database. In our example, the Wordpress config file is located at I:\xampplite\htdocs\journal\wp-config-sample.php. Just open this file in notepad and edit the top section. Change the following text

Save the file as wp-config.php. Start the WordPress install by opening http://localhost/journal/wp-admin/install.php in your web browser. Once the install completes, make sure to write down or record the admin’s password. The admin is the main user inside of WordPress and there is no way to recover the password if lost.

Using the journal

1. How to add a post
2. Optionally change theme

To add a new post, you will need to log into WordPress. Most default themes give some link to the login script. If one is not available, just navigate to wp-login.php in your site. If following along with our example, you would go to http://localhost/journal/wp-login.php After logging in, you should see the following screen.

If you wish to record something quickly, you can use the quick post. You can enter the main post editing dialog by clicking the new post button at the top right. For a journal, it is unlikely that you will care about anything other than the title and body. I usually title my journal posts with the date, something like 2009-07-04. I do use tags when I enter my notes for the day. This makes it easier to find my notes at a later time.

Wordpress has the ability to change the look of the content by using themes. WordPress.org has a list of themes as do many other web sites. WordPressThemesbase.com is another one. Look around and find something you like. I chose a very plain Jane type of theme for my journal because I didn’t have needs for ads, widgets, other users etc..

Have fun. Leave any questions in the comments.