I upgraded two WordPress sites to the latest version, one was running 1.5.2 and the other 1.2. The thing is that I was not impressed at all by the upgrade process and provided documentation. Here are the issues I ran into:

• The readme.html provided with the download is totally misleading when it comes to upgrades. It makes you think that upgrading is a 3-step process -- dead wrong. You should check the upgrade instructions on the official WordPress documentation site, it has no less than 17 very detailed steps.
• In both cases as soon as I uploaded the new code, the sites went completely blank with absolutely no error messages. While trying to see what is wrong, I ran into the second major issue: the official WordPress forum. The forum does not have decent search (it looks like Yahoo search is used and it does crash on you) and features in general are missing. Less is not more in this case.
• After manually going through many pages of the forum and seeing that lots of people had 'blank page' problems, for various reasons, it turned out that I had to turn off caching by uncommenting a line in a php file. This is bad. Very bad.
• Upgrading a 1.2 installation is impossible following the official upgrade documents. You are supposed to upgrade in two steps, from 1.2 to 1.5 and then from 1.5 to 2.0. Fair enough, but this means that you need WordPress 1.5, try to find a way to download it. The download page offers only the latest version and even the old postings announcing 1.5 have no links to the download anymore. Again, manually paginating through forum provided the solution: http://static.wordpress.org/archive/

I really like WordPress, I think that it is one of the nicest pieces of software that I ever used, so I hope that I am not too harsh with these comments. I can see two problems with the WordPress official site: simplicity was pushed too far and the not invented here syndrome.

The Independent World Television has an interesting collection of videos on their site and it keeps growing. It would be great if you could watch them using the DTV Internet TV viewer (Mac only for now), but there is no RSS stream for these videos.

The good news is that you can create such an RSS feed using del.icio.us. I created a special del.icio.us user for this, bookmarked the first few videos and here is the feed:
http://del.icio.us/rss/iwt/system:media:video

A really nice overview (and tons of useful links): Be the Media: the state of the public webcasting platform - CommonMedia.org.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation announced this week the new Legal Guide for Bloggers. While this guide only applies to people living in the US it is still worth reading even if you libe somewhere else.

It seems trivial to podcast with WordPress, all you need to do is to add the full link to an audio file and WordPress will generate the necessary enclosure for podcasting. See the Podcasting with WordPress tutorial and the Codex page on podcasting.

A new tool for webmasters from Google: Sitemaps. The idea seems to be to provide a special xml file to search engines to help the index your site. Google also provides a Python script that helps you create a sitemap for your site.

The next step will be for content management systems to automatically generate these sitemaps. WordPress already has a plugin for this.

Bryan Clark is working on an interesting project: Background Channels. The idea is to create a Gnome service that allows you to connect to an RSS feed with background images, when a new image is available it is downloaded and installed as a desktop background. There is some code written already, but the project seems to need quite a bit more design and coding before completion.

A couple of RSS submission pages mentioned by Blogging Pro: Brain Bliss network's Feed Shark and Thomas Korte's Feed Submission Service for RSS feeds.

Feed Shark could use some instructions: what URL is expected, why do you have to add that code to your page (and to which page), how can you suggest new sites? Also, submitting to all 20 sites in one step would help.

Not sure if these two scripts provide any extra features compared to Ping-o-Matic.

Two more postings along the lines of Planet Express. These two are not as generic, they deal with WordPress only, how to create an aggregator around it.

"WordPress Aggregator Blog :: Want one?" is a tutorial on how to implement an aggregator. This implementation is based on the WordPress RSS Aggregatro from LughingMeme and the Magpie RSS parser.

FeedWordPress is a plugin that aggregates Atom and RSS feeds.

Planet Express is a clever variation of the Planet Planet feed agregator. Instead of generating static pages with all the collected items it is publishing them to a blog. Having a blong as the front end is great since you can benefit from all the features of a full featured blog: archives, comments, search, ...

Curretly Planet Express is at version 0.2. I may give it a try with the two Planet sites I am worki