We posted a video yesterday to this WordPress-based website, which prompted setting up the “Post to Blog” sharing option of YouTube, which makes it faster and easier to share content. In doing so, D.Shak felt that it would be appropriate to carry out an important maintenance task that has been due for a couple months – upgrade from WordPress 2.5 to 2.5.1 – so, he also tried the WordPress Automatic upgrade plug-in. Upgrades are important to keep up with, but they often result in issues to iron out. There were a couple burps (i.e. the process was repeated two or three times), getting through it error-free by the end, and it seems that all modifications have been preserved. Overall, today’s experience with WordPress and YouTube was impressively smooth and easy.

Considering the relative ease and success of upgrading this WordPress deployment, we were left motivated to also activate the Akismet plug-in, which checks comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. We needed to setup a WordPress.com API key to use it, which was quick & easy to do. Shak.WS is now showing off Akismet stats on the sidebar at the right! Hopefully the Akismet plug-in will save some time that was being lost to spam, of which I currently receive several per day.

D.Shak