Around the end of May I upgraded the weblog software to the latest WordPress version 1.5. The upgrade itself went smoothly — except that the image uploading and browsing plugin (IImage-browser) has not been upgraded for version 1.5, and it stopped working. I tried to fix that plugin without much success, so I downloaded a different plugin, the one that was the source for the non-working plugin (image-browser.php) and installed that plugin instead. The only problem is, this plugin doesn’t do uploads. So, doing an upload is now a two-step process.

• First, the image is uploaded using the “Upload” tab
• Then one of two processes can be used:

• A code snippet on the Upload page can be copied and inserted into the writing area, or
• You go back to the write page and click on “Insert Image”, select the image, and then add that code to the post< /li>

In any regard, it’s a more complicated process. I’ll have to keep track of whether or not the author of the other plugin ever gets around to updating his code for the new version.

Doing the upgrade is quite important, however, to the process of preventing trackback spam. Trackbacks are supposed to let you know that someone on their blog has referenced something on your blog. They end up as comments in the referenced weblog entry. The purpose is to enhance one’s position in a Google search. One of the parameters that Google uses to decide where a link should be shown on the results page is how many time the result is linked-to by other web pages. The idea is that the more often a web page is referenced by other web pages, then the more important that web page is. So, by inserting a whole bunch of trackbacks into a weblog, the offending site can potentially increase its page rank and thus show up earlier in the search results. Most of the trackback spam is currently coming from online poker websites. I’m tired of having to delete all of that spam from my weblog, and version 1.5 has some plugins that will significantly reduce the amount of trackback spam. So, I’ve upgraded my weblog as well as the other weblogs on my server. With every change, there are always unintended consequences and the complication in the method of uploading pictures is definitely an unintended consequence of this upgrade!