Welcome to www.DrupNewb.com, a site where I learn about building a Drupal site and tell all.

I started out by downloading the latest stable version of Drupal, which was 5.3, from www.Drupal.org to my laptop. Drupal comes in one big compressed file, which was named "drupal-5.3.tar.zip" when I downloaded it.

I used Winzip to uncompress the zip file into all the directories and files I would need to install Drupal. I uploaded the uncompressed files under the drupal-5.3 to the root directory for www.DrupNewb.com on my Lunarpages server.

After that I used cpanel -> phpMyAdmin on Lunarpages to create a database and user for DrupNewb. Note that many servers will append a prefix to the name you create, so a database named drupdb might become lunar17_drupdb.

Then I brought up www.DrupNewb.com for the first time, and I was prompted to enter the database name and password, which I had just set up. After entering that I was asked to enter the primary admin id and email.

...and I now had a working Drupal installation of my very own.