I finally upgraded to WordPress 2.7 for both my personal blog and my book (the artist's guide to the gimp) web site. As part of the upgrade I switched both sites to a new theme:  ByteTips.  This theme is extremely clean when viewed in firefox and seems to work well in IE, though I don't know what version was tested.

Along with the upgrade, I've migrated to the NextGen Gallery from photoshow.  This is a far superior gallery manager that is under active development (Photoshow does not appear to be supported anymore).

As part of the upgrade I decided to finally enable commenting from guests.  Akismet is pretty good at catching all the spam that comes in so hopefully it will catch anyone who abuses the commenting.  I wanted to get some feedback from visitors but have always worried about having to administer the site more than I want just to clean out the spam.  Hopefully Akismet will handle the majority of that problem for me.

The 2.7 release for wordpress has a nice plugin called Simple Tags.  Since my site predated tagging in blogs none of my posts had any tags, so creating a tag cloud (using a builtin tag cloud widget) didn't do anything.  Simple Tags let me specify a large set of tags (I just browsed the site and pulled keywords manually from blog entry titles) and then apply them enmasse to all my posts.  Viola!  Instant tag cloud.  Very cool.

I also added a contact form that integrates with Akismet.  I'll leave that up until I find it allows too much spam into my inbox.

All this upgrading is part of a process of keeping up to date on WordPress so I can give a talk on the subject next month at the Colorado Springs Open Source Meetup.  Hope to see you there!