I was chatting with my mother-in-law tonight and she was asking questions about my blog and explaining some of the limitations she’s run up against hosting her blog on Blogger. I decided I’d get her up and running on WordPress.
A few years ago it might have taken hours to get a WordPress blog 
running from scratch. Tonight it took less than 5 minutes. Here’s how I did it:
- Logged into my control panel at Bluehost which runs my website and this blog.
- Added domain to my account and parked it for ten bucks.
- Used Fantastico to install WordPress 2.2. This is one slick utility. Creates the MySQL database and user account.
- Updated WordPress theme.
It was quick and painless. I spent a little more time adding a few more plugins and importing her posts from Blogger which worked very well. She downloaded Windows Live Writer which would install on her XP machine but when it tried to configure her blog setting would error out (missing some attribute) and close down. Installing it on her Vista laptop took care of the problem, but it was frustrating since it worked fine for me on XP.
But overall it was still easy to get everything up and running.
Nordquist Blog 
Hi, I’m one of the developers of Windows Live Writer. I’d be happy to help figure out what’s going wrong with Windows Live Writer on the XP machine, if you want to send me the log file:
http://jcheng.wordpress.com/writer-tips/logfile
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Oh it is now working perfectly! Thanks for getting it set up, Brett. I adding putting some of my poetry. Probably not what most blogger’s blog … but oh well, I am Grandma and I get to do what I want! I had to fix a few of the punctuation things on the blogs you transfered over but it wasn’t every blog … just a few of them. Thank you Joe Cheng for helping out.
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I see there is no way to fix your goofs once they are posted in comments … I’ll have to be more careful!
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