As I was upgrading to the latest version of WordPress today (if you’re using WordPress and haven’t upgraded, version 2.7.1 just came out a little while ago, and I’d suggest upgrading), I ran into a bit of a snag. It turns out that the new built-in feature that upgrades WordPress automatically doesn’t play nice with the automatic upgrade plugin I had installed.

Of course as soon as I did the upgrade, I neglected to copy some files over (totally my fault), and there was a bit of a panicked “oh no, what did I do now” moment. This should just be a reminder to me that I need to back up my content much more often than I actually do (I think after I write this post, I’m going to just schedule an automatic backup to an empty Gmail account — that should do the trick).

This also got me a bit paranoid about WordPress security. After a bit of searching around, I came across a great plugin called Login Lockdown that will actually lock people out of your account if they try to log in too many times (in my case, I’m the only user of my blog, so I don’t want anyone else logging in at all).

There are various other measures you can take to secure WordPress (i.e. don’t make your password ‘123′ or the name of your dog), but they’re really too numerous for me to list them all here. In case you’re also worried about the security of your WordPress install, I’d highly suggest checking out the WordPress Security Scan plugin. And don’t forget to keep your WordPress version up to date.