The installation for LnBlog is a fairly easy process. For those who are not technologically inclined, just follow these step-by-step instructions.
The downloaded archive is a standard ZIP file format. On Windows you can
decompress this with WinZip or pretty much any other compression program. On
Linux, you can use your desktop environment's decompression utility, such as
Ark, or run unzip lnblog-version.zip from the command
line.
Use your favorite FTP program to upload the entire LnBlog installation folder to your web hosting account. The folder must go someplace under your web root. If you place it outside the web root, you will not be able to run the setup and configuration programs. Usually it is easiest to simply put the LnBlog folder in the root of your website.
After uploading the LnBlog folder, you can open up your web browser and
navigate to it. If, for example, you put the foler in your website root and
named it just "lnblog", then you would navigate to
http://www.yoursite.com/lnblog/ to find it. The first time you
visit this page, LnBlog will present you with the FTP file writing
configuration page.
LnBlog provides two ways to write files on the web server. The first way is to use the "native" filesystem functions. To configure this, all you need do is leave the "use native filesystem functions" option selected and hit the submit button. This is not recommended, however, because you will need to manually change file permissions to make the directories you want to put blogs in writable by everyone. Furthermore, your account will not own any files or directories that LnBlog creates, which can cause problems if you want to manage your site outside the software.
The second, and recommended, method for writing files is to use the FTP
interface. This requires that you be able to access you web space via FTP,
which you almost certainly can. To configure this, you need to select the
"use FTP" option, enter your username and password, and confirm the FTP host
name and the path to your FTP root. The FTP host name (which you will
probably have to change) is the server address that you use to upload files
to your site, such as ftp.mysite.com. In the (fairly common)
case where the FTP and web servers are the same system, you can also use
'localhost'. The FTP root path is an absolute path to the root of your site,
i.e. where you end up when you FTP into your site. By default LnBlog guesses
that this is two levels above where it is installed, which is probably right
if you put LnBlog in your web root. The optional prefix value is a string to
prepend to all FTP paths, such as the '~' character. The prefix is intended
primarily for developer testing and is usually not required.
Once you enter your file writing information, LnBlog will prompt you to create an administrative login. This login will be used to add new blogs, upgrade old blogs, and will also be the default login for any blogs you create.
After creating an administrative account, you will be directed to the login page. Enter the username and password you just created and you will see the administrative page.
Click on the "Add new blog" link to create a new weblog. On the new weblog page, you can enter the path to the blog, the name, a description, the web server path to an icon for the blog, the theme to use (LnBlog ships with two themes: "default", which I think is very nice, and "skepticats", which is the original and somewhat less nice theme) and the maximum number of entries to display on the front page. When you are done, hit submit and you will be taken to the front page of your new blog.
Please note that it is best to use a relative path to the blog. So, if the URL of LnBlog on your site is http://mysite.com/lnblog/ and you want to create a blog at http://mysite.com/myblog/, then you When you should give the path as ../myblog.
Also note that if the web server account does not have write permissions to the directory where you want the blog, then LnBlog will not be able to create it. You can either change the permissions on the folder that will contain your weblog folder, or you can manually create the folder and change the permissions to be writable by everyone.