Just a quick note that I have updated the WordPress blog software that runs this site to the latest version.
You shouldn’t see much of a difference, if any. It went well, for once.
If you’re reading this far, you must be interested, so I’ll go on 🙂 I got tired of the notices of new versions every time I entered the administration screen. There is also a news area that give updates from the WordPress people too and it finally said they recommended upgrading due to some security issues being fixed. Well, I figured security is good and looked into getting the latest version.
The program is free, all you do is download it, unzip it and then upload it to the site via FTP. When I went to download the program, the page with the upgrade notes mentioned a plugin that manages the upgrade installation for you.
So, the first thing I did was install the plugin, called WordPress Automatic Upgrade. It does all of the upgrade process for you, including downloading the newest version of WordPress directly to the server! No need to download it myself and FTP it anymore.
It also handles the whole sequence of things you should do for the installation of the new version – backup of the whole site, turning off all other plugins, putting it into maintenance mode.
I’ve done it manually in the past and know first-hand, if you mess up, you can scramble the whole site!
I always do these things to this site first, since it is a much less used site than my podcast page, so less would be lost if it crashed. I’m happy to report that the plugin did the job as advertised and made it so easy, it was inconsequential to do. I immediately went and did the same thing on the podcast page without a hitch.
