WordPress 2.5 was released earlier today so after making backups of things, I checked out the upgrade instructions when using subversion and was happy to find that it basically involved changing to the root of my WordPress installation and then issuing the following command:

svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5/

After watching the files scroll by, I pointed my browser at the upgrade URL, logged in and found everything appeared to be working.  I re-enabled my plugins and everything still seems to be working.

Sweet. 🙂

My congratulations to the WordPress development team for a job well done!

Since implementing the captcha challenge for comments on my blog about a week ago there hasn’t been a single comment trapped by Akismet.  Normally, there would have been about a hundred comments during that time that I would have had to review to make sure there were no false-positives, so I think it’s safe to say that it’s working.

Though I have other things in place to ensure that blog spam doesn’t make it through in the comments, I still have to periodically have to review those that were blocked to ensure they aren’t false positives.  On the things-that-annoy-me-scale, this doesn’t rank very high, but it still registers.  To deal with this, I’ve added a captcha challenge that you have to pass when entering a comment.

Hopefully this doesn’t break anything else.

I moved my blog and photo gallery to a new server last night.  For the most part, it was a fairly painless process, though I had to beat the webserver with a stick to get the permalinks working properly.

If you happen to find something I missed, please let me know. 🙂

One of the recently released widget plugins for WordPress lead me to a site called CO2Stats.com. Basically, you get a little scrap of code to insert into your blog (or any other type of website for that matter). When people visit your site, they cause a contribution to be made to renewable energy projects that help offset the CO2 they estimate running your blog causes to be emitted. The people at CO2Stats did some calculations and determined that the global average rate of carbon emissions due to the electricity consumption of a single personal computer interacting with a server is 17 mg of CO2/second. That is then used in a calculation involving the number and duration of visits to a website to calculate the total emissions for a site. The offsets are funded by advertising sponsors who are committed to making the Internet a little more environmentally friendly.

An entry in the Boston Herald Green World blog has an interview with the people behind CO2Stats.

I’ve just upgraded WordPress and also changed the theme I was using. Everything appears to be working, but my old blog entries that were in Pivot and my photo gallery are temporarily unavailable. I’ll get those working at some point.

A tip o’ the hat to Nurudin Jauhari, author of the Prosumer theme I’m using. 🙂