This evening I went through the process of upgrading WordPress to the recently released 2.1 series.

As a force of habit, I follow the guidelines for upgrading WordPress. Depending on the site of your blog, following the guidelines can be a little time consuming; things like backing up your database an other important files. Regardless of that small inconvenience, I follow it through and I’ve not had a problem during any WordPress upgrades in the past. I’m sure that the day I don’t follow it through will be the same time that I encounter my first problem, so I’ll just keep following the guidelines and live a pain free life.

Once all the formalities of taking backups and unloading plugins was handled, the actual upgrade was painless and very fast. Once the new copy of WordPress was on the server, I went through and reactivated all of my plugins and made sure they were all still working with the new WordPress 2.1 source code and to my surprise, everything was functioning as expected.

If you’re looking to start a simple web site for yourself or a small company, I’d recommend giving WordPress a look for your content management solution. It really is an elegant and extensible platform for publishing that just works.

Towards the end of September, I posted that Akismet was the bringer of light. Roughly six weeks later and nearly 30,000 dirty dirty spam messages later, my opinion of Akismet as a spam filtering mechanism hasn’t changed one bit at all.

Akismet has been so consistent at blocking spam from my blog that I am heavily considering letting it simply delete the spam automatically. I don’t think I would want it to report all of what it automatically deletes as spam, as that might very well harm the Akismet service (read: skew their statistics).

Of course, if I implemented some form of human computer interaction during posting, that would also pretty much crush the spam problem as well.