Last week I discovered a nice little WordPress plug-in that promised to automate the upgrade process for the program. Upgrading WordPress is relatively simple, still there are a number of steps that you are supposed to follow to do it properly. So, I often put off upgrades out of pure laziness. Upgrades happen quite often, mostly plugging security holes, so they’re pretty important. I was currently due for an upgrade, so I downloaded and installed this plug-in built by Keith Dsouza, a programmer originally from Mumbai, India. Unfortunately, I got errors on running the program. But on the last screen there was a pleasant note from Mr. Dsouza himself offering help if anyone ran in to problems. I sent him the errors I was getting and he promptly got back to me indicating there appeared to be a bug that was causing errors in some hosting environments and that he would need to find an account that mirrored where my blog’s hosting environment. Easy to do! Since we run our own hosting service I quickly offered to give him an account on the same server as my blog. The next morning he had the bug tracked down, fixed and the new version of the plug-n posted. I updated to the latest version, ran the script and it went off perfectly.

So if you have your own hosted WordPress blog and find it a pain to do the upgrades, I suggest you try this out. And if you like it, you might give Mr. Dsouza a vote in the Weblog Tools Collection plug-in competition. Just click the number of starts you’d give it.