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it wasn’t such a problem because I could use Fantastico to update them … and since their newish they weren’t all that out of date.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 transferred 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.
When you moved did you notice a change in google PR? I heard that swapping platforms etc can seriously effect this.
Phil
Phil changing over to a new webhost shouldn’t affect your PR if your domain and url remains the same. People that change from one blogging platform to another, say from blogger to a typepad or wordpress site would have a change of domain and url and they would end up losing their sites PR and links to their site. Perhaps that’s what you’re thinking of?
With WP 2.3 for the plugins that are registered with WP just login into your WP dashbaord go to plugins and you can see which plugins have updates.
It takes Fantastico a while before it has the latest updates and then your hosting has to update its version of Fanstastico so I just do everything manually its not hard.
I usually used to outsource the whole thing since like you i have a zillion blogs! But recently I found a wordpress auto upgrade plugin which worked seamlessly on my sites….i first tested it in one of those smaller blogs then on my main biggie ones. hope you will find it useful soon enough since wordpress is upgrading to 2.5 really soon 😉 lol
i couldn’t work out how to automatically update my blogs with fantastico? i had to learn how to do it the long way (new to all this stuff). we wont have to worry with 2.5 anyway, one click upgrades. 🙂