Wednesday, February 08, 2012

Bleg: Web hosting for my version of a logic textbook.

I want to create a simple webpage to promote a version of a free logic textbook that I have been working on. Basically, I want to have a dedicated website to host the .pdf file for the text, the LaTeX source file, some text promoting the virtues of the book and open access textbooks in general, supporting textbook materials, and maybe some tools for collaboration. And I should have an easy to remember URL.

I was thinking that Wordpress would be the easiest software to use. What should I do for hosting? Pick the cheapest host that partners with Wordpress? Will there be much of a learning curve with Wordpress?

The last time I created a website was almost 10 years ago, and I just wrote something in HTML and transferred it to some host using FTP software. Can you still build websites like that?

4 comments:

Matt BK said...

You can still build websites like that (HTML and FTP), depending on what you want them to look like and/or do.

Wordpress comes highly recommended by people, although I've never used it myself. I'm using Drupal for a number of sites right now, but that's more content management than bloggish (and involves a lot more backend development as I understand it). Wordpress does have a lot of plugins to add functionality, so I assume you could build in file lists and things like that.

snarkout said...

You could sign up to use wordpress.com (hosted Wordpress) and your own domain name; that's probably your cheapest offer. You don't want to run your own Wordpress instance, because Wordpress has a terrible reputation for security. (Looks like WP.com charges $17/year for this, or $12/year if you already own the domain name).

Logica1 said...

Hi Rob,

You could also house it as a Google document. Then, simply insert the link, to the document, wherever you want others to have quick access to it.

It's like turning every document into a mini website.

I house all lectures and assignment instructions for my online classes, in Google documents. Then I don't have to download or upload anything.

Rob Helpy-Chalk said...

Karla,

Thanks for the recommendation. I tried google docs when it first came out, and found it buggy and frustrating. I gather it must have gotten better sense then, since a lot of people seem to be having success with it.

I wound up creating a WordPress site for the textbook, which is here forallxremix.org