What was I doing? Anyway, WordPress now working fine.

Yes, it seems I had gone down a dead end when I tried to build WordPress on a local server (localhost) because anybody can use wordpress.com to set up a freely-hosted blog in WP. It's all explained here.
The irony is that when I had started blogging almost two years ago, I had actually used this route to set up a WP blog. However, seems I had totally forgotten about it and it never got any further than one or two experimental posts.
In any event, I have now set up a new blog using WP and, just based on this preliminary experience, I'm starting to like WP a lot.
This could mean that my ComputerNotes blog might move over to WP at some stage.