i woke up to a lovely email from wordpress letting me know that wordpress 3.0 is now available. i had the initial fear of “oh god if i update my wordpress i might have to recode this whole damn layout” but thankfully nothing exploded. i love the newer versions of wordpress for their auto update feature. never again will i have to go though the hell of old wordpress upgrades.

for a while now i’ve had a little trick up my sleeve for my theme writing and blog testing. i have a local install of wordpress tucked away on my hard drive that i use to make sure i’m not going to cause my blog to die in a fire. its seriously simple to set up and you can find the directions here. you can use it to build your new themes without having to upload it to your site, you can test out new wordpress updates without making a mess, and you can make sure those new plugins work right before setting them up in your live blog.

so i just ran to my local install and updated wordpress and everything looked ok, so now the real blog is on wordpress 3.0. yay!