Earlier today as I was surfing the net and reading some of the blogs I favor I came across an article about a new plugin that will help you prepare your Wordpress installation for an upgrade to version 2.3.3 and coming soon WP 2.5.

The Wordpress plugin is called the WordPress Upgrade Preflight Plugin. The current version, 1.1, is meant for those who are about to upgrade their WP installation to 2.3.

The Preflight Check plugin will attempt to check your other plugins and themes for any problems that might cause errors when upgrading. It apparently also works in 2.3 and may help identify the cause of any current errors as well.

As I stated in March I was slowly going through my sites and upgrading them from Wordpress versions 2.1 and 2.2 to 2.3. I have a lot of blogs and to be perfectly honest with you I still have four left to upgrade!

I’m using some highly customized older themes on a few of my blogs and as I’ve upgraded I’ve found code that I had to alter to work with WP 2.3. I also had to update a number of plugins. This was time consuming work. I’m sure the Preflight Check plugin will make finishing my upgrades to my final four WP blogs a lot easier. Of course I’ve already updated the plugins.

The plugin author is currently working on a version for WP 2.5 so if you’re planning on upgrading to 2.5 soon be sure to check the Preflight Check page for updates.

Oh and don’t forget to backup your Wordpress database and files before you do any upgrades! I use the Wordpress Database Plugin which allows you to not only backup your files to the server, but to have your backup emailed to you as well. You can also schedule regular backups too.

Whether your an occasional at home computer user or someone who relies heavily on your computer for business there’s no denying how important it is to back up your vital files regularly. All it takes is a computer virus or a power failure and your data could be lost forever.

While there are many back up programs that you could use I think you might agree that Backup Platinum has quite a few useful features.

Backup Platinum allows you to back up your data to pretty much any type of storage medium meaning you could store your valuable backup data on another computer, a network, an external drive, an FTP server or even a CD or DVD.

Not only that, you can set up regular backups using the program wizard in order to define what is backed up, where it’s backup from, how to back up your data and when those backups should take place.

If you chose to backup your data onto a CD or DVD you can use a rewritable disk. The program can be set up so that any data on the disk is erased prior transferring new backup data. This means that you could set the Backup Platinum program to create a new backup each night and only the latest backup would be on your rewritable CD or DVD.

Backups can be kept small and secure thanks to the programs 128-bit encryption with Blowfish and multichoice ZIP. Also, if you happen to have a lot of data to backup the backup can be split into several parts which would make it easer to transfer your finished backup data elsewhere if needed.

One thing that I like about this program is that it creates detailed logs of all operations and if something goes wrong with your backup you can easily restore with a simple click of a button.

Backup Platinum has been specifically designed to work on Windows operating systems.

If you’d like to try Backup Platinum you can download a limited 30 day trial version. Then if you like the programs features you can purchase the license for a full copy.

I have a lot of blogs. A LOT of blogs. I’ve been delaying updating them because I knew it would take forever.

I’ve slowly been updating my installations over the past week. For my newer domains it wasn’t such a problem because I could use Fantastico to update them … and since their newish they weren’t all that out of date.

However all my older blogs, including this one, moved servers twice last year and I lost the ability to automatically update with Fantastico when I moved the sites to new servers. If I’d done fresh installations using Fantastico to install WP on the domains and directories first and then transfered my former databases into the new installations I could have avoided this problem, but that’s not the way things worked out.

Oh well … I don’t mind manual updating the blogs. It just takes time.

I’ve had a problem with my blogs for a little while. My problems started back when the Bad Behavior plugin had a problem a couple of months ago. Remember something with the blacklists went wrong and it blocked people out of their WP installations until they either turned off their plugin or updated it? Well I did the update and I updated my Google Sitemaps plugin at the same time and ever since then I had an error message whenever I published an article (on 7 different blogs!) and I don’t think my do follow plugin was working correctly either.

Well now, along with updating this blog to WP 2.3.3 I’ve also updated Bad Behavior (it’s latest version is 2.0.13 if your keeping track) and Google Sitemaps ( Version 3.0.3). At first I thought I still had a problem, but I refreshed the permalinks and tada - it’s all working well again.

I wasn’t that far behind in updating Wordpress. I think this blog was 2.2 … so it hasn’t been that long since I updated. However, WP has done a lot of updates in recent months and between the problems I was having with the plugins and being behind in upgrading WP I knew it was time to upgrade. I won’t fall so far behind again!

So far I’ve updated 6 new domains plus this domain. Now I’ve got 7 blogs on Feverishthoughts.com and one on yet another domain to manually upgrade. It will probably be a few days before I’m completely done … sigh.

I don’t think that there’s much that Google doesn’t have it’s hand in these days.

The latest news is that we’ll soon be able to create websites on Google. The sites will run on Google servers and I imagine will be fairly easy to use for non-techies. By that I mean you won’t have to know much if any code to create a website of your own within a matter of minutes!

Here’s a news story I found that discusses Google’s latest step into the world of website creation:

Wow it’s been a while since I’ve written anything.

Sorry about that. Life got busy and I haven’t been testing out Wordpress plugins or other cool web related items or sites in the last few weeks. I’m sure I’ll get back to finding interesting things for you to try soon!

I hope that all of my visitors are off to a good start in 2008 and that the year brings you health, happiness and with some luck perhaps prosperity.

Happy New Year everyone!