Regulars will know that I’ve been putting off, dreading, and then yesterday spent several hours trying to work out the upgrading of the version of my WordPress installation.

And it was all unnecessary (although I suppose I learnt more about the whole structure of WordPress, PHP databases and similar that might come in handy some time).

All I had to go was go to Fantastico in my server control panel and press one button to update (at least to the one-but-last upgrade – it will apparently be a couple of weeks before the latest one arrives.)

Potentially useful to know … and one of those things that seems so obvious to the techies that they don’t bother to tell you this is possible.

Be told!

(This is only on hosts that provide “one-button installation” of WordPress. I’ve told the very nice help-desk that they should also note it is one-button update.)

Jax was kindly asking about the progress of my WordPress update – ah, if you were trying to read Philobiblon this afternoon sorry about that – while trying to backup a PhP database I managed to delete it. (Thanks Bluehost help desk for getting it back!)

I think I’ve more or less got a handle on what I’m supposed to be doing, but have done about as much file fiddling as I can take for the day – maybe the end of this week I’ll try to actually do the actual update.

The time when I should have really sorted out backing up my computer is long past, so I’m finally getting to it. Any experiences, suggestions welcome.

I’m planning to get a portable external hard drive which I can keep in a different place and backup the whole computer once a week.

I’ve now got about 20GB total on the computer (with a capacity of 140), so figure an 80GB storage will do for a long time to come.

I’m looking at say this Phillips from Amazon, which has Nero software which presumably should do all I need for a complete backup. (I’ve had bad experiences with Nero before, but perhaps it has got better?

Or perhaps I should buy a cheaper drive on eBay and also buy Norton Ghost, which some seem to suggest is THE solution. (But then I’ve had bad experiences with Norton too.)

Ahhh – computers don’t you love ’em.

(And for an encore tonight I’m planning to update my WordPress installations – one still running 1.5 and the other an early 2, but I believe if I install the latest I’ll solve the sending referrer problems … If you hear a faint screaming in the distance anywhere in Europe tonight it will probably be me. Any tips on this will also be welcome – I’m planning to work – carefully – off the Codex directions.)

A very interesting example of the really positive possibilities of open access newspapers – the response to Tristram Hunt’s column comparing 19th-century China and modern Britain is one-sided and perfectly fair. (You don’t really have to read the column, just the comments.)

Since Orange has again been flakey over the weekend, I’m increasingly serious about changing ISPs, so posted a question on a specialist bulletin board. A very sensible comment was made that if you want service you need one of the small ones, not the big monoliths, and there’ve been several recommendations that I’ll be looking at this week.

Interesting summary of the state of quantitative knowledge about the blogosphere on a Telegraph blog: 27 per cent of UK internet users have their own blog, or 5 per cent do; 75 per cent of Britons have visited a blog, or 62 per cent have never visited a blog.

As ever, it is all in how you ask the question, and how you classify the answers. I for one would call MySpace sites and MSN Spaces blogs (although they can often be hard to navigate and link to).

On the subject of lies and damn statistics: Matthew Parris is trying to work out just how much power having appliances on standby uses. The short answer, on something that should be more quantifiable, is, that no one knows. Doesn’t means that you won’t still save yourself a bit of cash by switching things right off, however, but debates such as this would certainly benefit from a solid bit of basic research.