Setting up WordPress

For my first blog here I would like to mention something about installing WordPress. I was following  the well documented easy steps for installing WordPress via Fantastico De Luxe. Soon, enough everything was done after filling out a few bits of information, I thought I was ready to get started. According to http://codex.wordpress.org/First_Steps_With_WordPress, I should have been able to click on the <– visit site next to the top left hand title of your domain in wp-admin in order to see what my blog looked like. Once I clicked on this link I was instead directed to a directory listing of where WordPress was installed. I was pretty sure a simple .htaccess file in my blog directory would solve the problem, which was reiterated in several forums (ie. http://wordpress.org/support/topic/181297). This did not prove to be the only problem though.  After, trying numerous other suggestions discovered on the web for fixing the directory listing problem, I threw in the towel and sent my hosting company’s customer service an inquiry about the problem.  It turns out that since I use a hosting company meant for java (ie., jsp, servlets, etc.) Tomcat trumps Apache .htaccess files. Simple solution is to ask them to unmap a directory. In my case, I asked them to unmap the blog directory where I have installed the php based WordPress. Now everything works fine, so I wanted to share this solution for anybody else who may encounter this problem.