Welcome to Benny

Wordpress 4.0 Upgrade It’s cause for celebration here at LifeIntrigued.  5 years ago to the month (the month coincidence being a complete surprise when I did a quick search) I went through the scary and stressful process of upgrading the WordPress engine that powers this blog.  My complete admiration to the WordPress developers for putting out a solid product that hasn’t failed me once in that timeframe.  From one developer to another .. bang up job!  During the course of those 5 years there has been a number of upgrades that were released but when something is working perfectly you generally don’t risk destabilizing it.  There is one situation that does cause concern and that is when a security issues is identified and that is exactly what happened about a month back.  My provider (Go Daddy) informed me that my site was vulnerable to takeover and highly recommended upgrading immediately.  To that point I had not discovered any issues, but about a week after that my site was being pounded by spam comments all written in Chinese.  Akismet successfully caught every one of them but it was unnerving and the timing with the vulnerability was too close to ignore.  7 years of blogging wasn’t something I wanted to risk losing so started the long process of backing up the control files and then started investigating what it was going to take to perform the upgrade – the last time was fairly involved and assumed I needed to dedicate some time to learning what to do.  During that investigation I learned that the last upgrade included a new upgrade tool that basically did all the work for you.  Could this be too good to be true… well, let’s just say the actual upgrade process took me an amazing 10 minutes to complete and most of that time was simply validating the upgrade.  Once again the WordPress crew have delivered a top notch product.  The blog is now officially at release level Benny or more precisely WordPress 4.0 which was released on Sept 4th.  I probably won’t hesitate to stay a little more current on releases from this point on but for now this one happy blogger.  If you experience any user problems let me know and I look into it.  I went through all features I use to develop posts and previewed the outputs but I actually see a slightly different view of the reader’s perspective that has a few more controls for me to manage the content.

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3 comments on “Welcome to Benny

  1. Ron

    Well, my WordPress version is so old it would take a major, multistage effort to update it. I just looked and I have 377 spam comments from the last 15 days, all caught by Askimet. One day I’ll update it. Glad to hear you had no trouble with the latest version, particularly since you use the same theme that I do.

    Ron

  2. admin

    My previous upgrade was definitely a pain in the ass but now that I’m on the new versions quite pleased with the upgrade process. Were all those spam containing Chinese characters? that was the bulk of all mine. The theme worked great – just upgraded WP, then went to the theme and used the auto upgrade on that as well – easy peasy .. oh wait .. .”No Drama” hehehe

  3. Ron

    No, the spam weren’t in Chinese. It all had the exact same look, so I think it originated from the same spamming source.

    Ron

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