A D V E R T I S E M E N T
This "how to" is intended for beginners and for those who want to learn to set up a website but don't have a professional web server. This is also useful for web developers, but this post is not for them, in fact I learned this from them. Some developers used local web server to develop a website and upload it when finished. This is also used by web designers in creating a new theme. You do not need this if you have no desire to learn beyond HTML.

About local web server

Web server is a computer that runs a program that accepts hypertext transfer protocol (http). To make these things simple, try to write in the address bar of your browser the address "rtfverterra.com" without the quote and noticed that it is automatically prefixed with http and the one you typed turned into http://rtfverterra.com/. Local web server resides in your local machine (your computer) with or without internet connection. You can have your own website, but this website is not available in the internet. It has an address of http://localhost/yourwebsite; the "yourwebsite" in the address can be any name. There are many ways to set up a localhost, the most popular are WAMP, LAMP, and XAMPP. If you are using Windows XP, you may also use its bundled Internet Information Service (IIS). This "how to" however will focus only on XAMPP, particularly XAMPP for Windows machine.

The setup process

1. Download the right XAMPP for you, I assume you are using Windows. Don't worry, it's free. I recommend the exe file it is easy to install; the XAMPP people recommend it too. Download the exe file here. You may visit the XAMPP website for more information.
2. Install the newly downloaded file, just follow the onscreen instruction.
3. After the successful installation, run the XAMPP program, it's icon maybe in your desktop or in the start menu. In the XAMPP control panel, be sure to start Apache and MySQL.
4. Hola! You have your local server running. Open a browser (Internet Explorer or Firefox), and in the address bar type http://localhost/xampp

That's it, very simple. In my next post, let us install Wordpress in your local machine and run it with XAMPP. Hmmm, exciting.

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