What a day! Upgraded the site to WordPress 2.0, and introduced Ads. Its a surprise I have any time to do my paid job!
Well, not that surprising. The whole exercise has taken around 30 minutes – love that! The WordPress upgrade is a doddle. The hardest part is doing all the backup steps “just in case” – the actual upgrade is soooo simple! (And, touching wood, after 4 WordPress upgrades I am yet to need my backup files 
).
Hard to tell from the look of the site that much has changed, but the back-end admin is much improved. AJAX really lifts the bar for what we expect from web-driven apps nowadays. Deleting comments is particularly nice – seeing them go red then fade away is kinda fun, and really satisfying when it happens to be comment spam.
As an added bonus, the SecureImage plugin I use to get Captchas (a means of preventing comment spam) worked straight away with the new version.
I’ve had ads on my company web site for some time now, to support those resources I make available for free, so I was already a member of the AdSense program. I thought I’d trial ads on the blog as a bit of an experiment. I’m using the Adsense Deluxe plugin, which seems really nice so far – this post will be the first real test of it. It seems to be under active development – last update was only a week ago.
If nothing else, the experience has been an eye-opener about the size of the WordPress community. There’s a real wealth of extensions and experience out there!