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It's always good to do some research before you jump into things. I know this. I often give this advice to other people. One day I may heed it myself.

There on Tuesday night I was hit with the inspiration to register a domain name and set up web-space for my bonsai blog. The inspiration struck when I thought of a good domain name for my site. I think it's good anyway but I should leave that to the bonsai-reading public to decide.

I went to a service provider I've used in the past so setting up the domain and web-space went smoothly. By Wednesday it was set up and I was ready to start work on my site.

Up until now, I've run my blogs on free hosts where the software is already installed and although I have some good html experience I know next to nothing about the whole PHP scene. I've had the most experience of using Wordpress so that was the first blogging software I thought of. Full of optimism I downloaded the Wordpress software and had a look at the readme information.

Stumbling block number one: My web-site design experience started in the mid-90s and fizzled out around the start of 2000 and is limited to html proficiency and ability to edit settings in javascript with great difficulty. There may have been things like PHP and mySQL in 2000 - I don't know but I was able to get by without them. Not any more.

In order to use Wordpress on your own site you need to have access to PHP and mySQL. I can't comment on Wordpress's claims about a five minute installation. All I can say is that it took me less than that to realize I wouldn't be able to use it on my site without upgrading to a more expensive package that provided access to mySQL.

I then began the search for blogging software that would work without mySQL. Google threw up lots of options. I came across one which looked pretty good, called Frog. I downloaded that. Stumbling block number two: I couldn't understand the readme instructions! Maybe with a bit of patience, if I went away and studied a bit about it I would be able to work out what I was supposed to change the settings to but I thought that that was what readme instructions did!

After fruitlessly banging my head off the desk for a while I spent the rest of Wednesday night googling for another piece of PHP blogging software that didn't use mySQL and looked good and was also easy to customize. The most promising one I came across was Simple PHP Blog which I downloaded.

On Thursday I began uploading it to my server. According to the plan all I had to do

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