I’ve just upgraded this blog to the latest version of WordPress, and enabled comments. If you’re reading this, please say hello, and let us know if it does or doesn’t work. Also, have a quick browse round the site and check I haven’t broken anything else.

We were using a 1.2 version of WordPress, and I wanted to upgrade to 1.5, partly to get any security fixes, and partly for better comment spam handling. Upgrading was a bit awkward, because all the templates are stored in a different place, so I had to reinstall and configure from scratch. I made a parallel installation, inside a subfolder (where it is tidier anyway) and with differently named database tables. Got the new theme working, then upgraded the database, pointed the main site into the subfolder, and deleted the old installation of WordPress. There must be a better way of maintaining upgrades to web applications, but nobody has worked it out yet. At least WordPress provides a very good database migration script.

To help reduce comment spam, we ask you to enter a simple keyword with your posts. This works well against bots which just crawl the web posting randomly. It’s custom, although very simple, code. That’s why it works – immunity through diversity.