I’ve been avoiding updating this blog from WordPress 2.2 to 2.3.1. Not that I had made so many changes that would make upgrading difficult, but I just didn’t want to deal with the hassle. Picking a theme was tough enough for me, but I needed to upgrade with all the security fixes coming out.

I finally sat down and went through the process.

Boy, was it easy.

It took longer to download and unzip WordPress and the plugins than doing the upgrade. Having used the Ultimate Tag Warrior to tag all my posts, I was afraid the new tagging functionality in WordPress would screw it up. Instead, the WordPress tag import worked flawlessly and I had no changes to make. There were updates available for all the plugins and those upgrades went smoothly.

No wonder Movable Type is eager to go open source.

Why is it so hard for me to pick a theme for my WordPress blog? I have probably spent quite a few hours this past week, just staring at the huge variety of themes out there. I had been using the Barecity theme for some time now. Its absolutely clean, lets you concentrate on content, and has no distractions. Adding thumbnails of my Flickr images did provide some needed color. Eventually it just seemed bland.

I started thinking about what I was looking for in a theme:

• Clean (not cluttered at least)
• Minimal graphics
• Some color, preferably bright (but nothing crazy)
• Easy to modify

Now, that is a whole lot to ask for, but I figured I would hopefully find a couple that would interest me. So I just started looking around.

The WordPress Theme Viewer is one of the best resources around. I downloaded a few and tried them out. Having done some minor CSS and Javascript work a while ago for my day job, I quickly remembered why I could never make it as a web designer. CSS is its own beast and trying to modify someone else’s stylesheets to work in Firefox, IE6/7, and Opera, is time consuming and practically impossible. Granted, there are probably better tools than the “Edit CSS” tool in the Firefox Web Developer add-on, but I wasn’t looking to spend that much time on it.

To make a long story short, I eventually settled on what you see here. If the theme seems familiar, its the theme used at Blogging Pro. I like the blue and orange colors and didn’t have to make a whole lot of changes besides moving around some content on the sidebars.

Then I moved on to getting my tumblelog to match my blog somewhat. If you haven’t heard of tumblelogs, its just a way of aggregating things that you find interesting. So if you have lots of different accounts at sites like del.icio.us, flickr, Google Reader, etc, its an interesting way of letting others know what caught your attention. There are plenty of sites that do this, I’ve been using tumblr.

We’ll see how long I stick with this theme before I get tired of it and start searching again.