I learned the hard way that just because Wordpress releases an upgrade does not mean that I have to immediately upload it. It turned out that Wordpress 2.3.2 was not compatible with my blog Table for Five for some reason, even though I have 2.3.1 running on this blog, MomReviews, and MomCooks with no problems. I figured when I got around to upgrading T45, I would go ahead and use 2.3.2, which was supposed to be even better. Instead, I lost all of my categories. As in, all of my posts showed up as uncategorized.  The category widget on my sidebar was blank, and the Manage->Categories page was blank as well. To say it freaked me out would be a vast understatement.

Now obviously I could have done something wrong when I uploaded the new files, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t upgrade. But it’s important to backup everything, and often. Fortunately, I had saved Wordpress 2.2 when I upgraded to that version, so I was able to restore my blog back to that version of WP. I recommended using FTP to transfer all of your current files (anything that starts with wp-) directly to your desktop so they are easy to transfer back over if something goes wrong.

I’m not planning to attempt the upgrade again until at least this weekend, in case of another malfunction. I wish there was an easier way, because with each upgrade, I have to pick a new blog theme that is compatible (why can’t I just make changes to an existing theme to make it compatible?), change my plugins, it’s a pain. But that’s the price I pay for having a self-hosted blog I guess. It’s not like I’m going to go back to Blogger or anything

Sometimes it really bugs me that I always seem to be the last one to know about something. I’ve been noticing that when I post comments on blogs, it shows the URL and link to my latest post for whichever URL I’ve used in the comment field. I finally took a closer look and saw that it is the Wordpress Comment Luv plugin, which you can find at here. I’ve installed it on all of my blogs, and I’m hoping it encourages more comments. For some reason MomReviews, which gets pretty decent traffic and has a lot of feed subscribers, gets the least number of comments of all my blogs besides this one.

So if you comment, look for a link to your most recent post underneath. It’s wicked cool!

I’m loving this new theme I found, called OceanWide. I found it at ThemeBox, and it was created by Romow. I think the water and the fish are a nice soothing image to look at, especially on those days when I’ve been online for 16 hours.

I’m also grateful to BlueHost for having Fantastico, which installed WP 2.3.1 on this blog with one click. Every single time I attempt to manually upgrade, I screw it up. Every time. So I’m happy to wait until Fantastico can do it for me.

Kudos to the developers of 2.3 for adding a tagging field to the Write Post page. The only thing I don’t know is how they work. Are they Technorati tags? I need to find that out.