I’ve finally upgraded to WordPress 2.7 after much procrastination. This means that my blog is finally on a somewhat customised template and with many more features working, so it finally feels more personal.

Naturally, upgrading I had originally planned as a brief post Sunday lunch (well, late breakfast porridge) activity has now bled right through the afternoon and only just completed. I must say that my enthusiasm for finally upgrading was entirely down to loving the rather fine Fast Moving theme on the site Prosaic Paradise. A site which I incidentally visited thanks to inviting a photo into my recently created flickr pool of Heart Shaped Tyre Tracks, of which more in a later post.

The upgrade itself was as easy as usual, with more time spent carefully backing up files than putting the new ones into the right place, with all that done it was just a single click to upgrade. Then I realised how much more I’d have to do, I tracked down my chosen theme and then got it setup, which was a doddle, until I screwed up the permissions in various directories and had to change them three times. At that point I did swear loudly. CHMOD, how I hate thee.

My next struggle was the realisation that I had everything on the blog setup using categories when in fact tags would be far more useful. I then spent a good ten minutes doing it manually before I found the categories –> tags converter option in the admin interface. *Facepalm*

Once that was complete it was time to start looking for interesting plugins, having upgraded all my current ones, with the main priority being to integrate as much content and activity I have elsewhere on the web into my blog. I was very glad to find newer versions of Akismet (spam protection), Flickr Photo Album and the Livejournal Cross-Poster as I had come to rely on them.

Of the new plugins I have, none impresses me more than the XML Sitemap generator. Almost as impressive, though sadly not all I want it to be is Lifestream which let me integrate a series of feeds from YouTube, last.fm, flickr, delicous, google reader and twitter into a single list on a page. Not necessarily useful, but certainly kind of nifty when I try to remember something I’ve done recently.

Now to blog about other stuff and look for a meme to post as well… oh and fix my tagging, as the import didn’t get it exactly right!