I’ve worked in the tech industry for a while, and the nemesis of every IT person in the world is the software upgrade.

Since I hate it so much, all my blogs have been running on a WordPress 2.2 version. If you use WordPress, you know that 2.5 was a major revision.

This morning I decided to do an upgrade. I installed 2.7 and immediately found some things that were broken.

Popularity Contest, the neato plugin that puts the popularity number at the bottom of each post, had a fatal error. Andrew Daum had a great post with a nice video that explained how to fix Popularity Contest

The Now Reading plugin that I use to list the books I’m reading also had some issues. Found an update in a post entitled Now Reading for WordPress 2.7

Also upgraded the nextgen gallery plugin that displays my photo albums. This actually went smoothly and I was able to use the automatic update feature of WordPress.

After upgrading I found out that Ultimate Tag Warrior is no longer supported because tagging is built into WordPress now. That’s unfortunate because I had every post tagged and now those all went away. If there is a way to convert my old tags into the WordPress format, somebody please let me know.

Finally, and this was one of the big reasons I upgraded, I installed the Post Ideas plugin that helps managed ideas for new posts. So far I’m a little pleased, only thing I didn’t like is when I went to write this post it didn’t move my notes over anywhere like I expected it to. No problem, just a quirky thing.

So, WordPress is all up to date, only took a couple hours. Still have time left to take down some Christmas lights, get to the gym and be back in time to watch the Falcons crush the Cardinals.

Checkout the pictures of last year’s Colorado Blizzard and my trip to San Diego in 2006.

Now that I have this figured out, look for more pictures in the near future.

NextGEN Gallery appears to be a good upgrade from the WP Photo Album that I am currently using on Bob’s Bad Binder, and the Gallery software I’m using on this site.

WP Photo Album is good, but the one thing I really don’t like is the full size images run outside of the framework of the blog. NextGEN appears to use some nice AJAX to display the gallery.

I’ll see if I can get it installed in the next day or two, do some testing, and then maybe get some pictures of last week’s trip to Moab up there.

One note, just to let everyone know. I think I’m going to post all my new Warrior info on Bob’s Bad Binder – it’s more of a motorsports oriented blog, just makes sense.