The good people over at blogged.com ranked me at an 8.2 out of 10. I never even heard of blogged.com until I got an email from one of their editors yesterday stating:

“We evaluated your blog based on the following criteria: Frequency of
Updates, Relevance of Content, Site Design, and Writing Style.
After carefully reviewing each of these criteria, your site was given its 8.2 score.”

Looking over the site it looks like it has a nice directory of blogs in there, as each one is rated on a scale of 1 to 10 based on their quality and are hand-picked by the editors. Users have the ability to rank your blog too but according to the FAQ’s it doesn’t significantly affect your rating because the editors rate all of the blogs. Either way, I feel like I’m back in high school again trying to run a popularity contest. So ummm…vote for me.

I decided to stop being lazy and get around to those upgrades I needed for my site and server:

- Upgrade PHP to 5.2.5 and Apache 2.2.6

- Upgrade Gallery2 and the WPG2 plugin for WordPress

- Upgrade WordPress to 2.3.1

First, I should admit that I do use the EasyApache installer from WHM, as it has vastly improved to the point where I don’t have to troubleshoot its builds afterwards, nor do I have to go back and reinstall eAccelerator and Suhosin – The current release of cPanel now includes those options and I must say that they have become rather flawless. In other words, it saves me the time of compiling shit by hand when all I have to do is click a few buttons and it’s all done.

Second, I was avoiding the Gallery2/WPG2 upgrade because I remember that the first time I set it up it was hell, and since it was so long ago I didn’t want to go through that again.

Third, since my last WordPress upgrade I had numerous problems with plugins and as a result I had to tweak most of them because their developers hadn’t released an upgrade yet. I finally decided to just suck it in and upgrade, though it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. There are a few things to point out:

- Ultimate Tag Warrior has been discontinued due to WordPress 2.3.1′s native support for tagging. If you’re a UTW user like me, you can still keep your sexy tag cloud by follow these steps:

1. In your admin section, go to Manager > Import and use the UTW import tool to convert your UTW tags to WordPress tags. Then go to Manage > Categories and convert your categories to tags too, if they were linked to UTW before.
2. In your theme code where you normally would display your categories, change the code to <?php the_tags(”); ?> instead of <?php the_categories(”); ?> or whatever it was before.
3. Since your tag cloud is now gone, remove the UTW code and replace it with <?php wp_tag_cloud(”); ?>. You can read more about configuring the tag cloud here.

Since removing UTW and upgrading my plugins and WP, I noticed that my site loads a ton faster though, so I’m overall glad that I finally got around to doing this stuff. If you’re lazy like me and still haven’t upgraded to WP 2.3.1, below is a helpful guide on how to do so:

http://polymathprogrammer.com/2007/10/29/upgrade-wordpress-2pt2-to-2pt3/