Well, I’ve taken the plunge.
I backed up my database, disabled my plugins and upgraded to WordPress 2.5. With almost zero trouble, I was up and running—and let me tell ya, I like it!
I’m going to give the new admin interface the benefit of the doubt, but I have Fluency, a new Admin Theme on standby in case I get tired of the softer tones. 
I’ve finally trimmed back my categories. (Thanks to Rob Miller for the Batch Categories plugin!) For a long, long time I’ve used WordPress categories to mimic tag function. That’s no longer necessary, now that version 2.3 has tags implemented by default.
So now I’ve essentially broken my blog into four categories. Well, three if you don’t count the “ESV Verse of the Day” project that’s fallen into limbo. The first category is “Community,” which is basically a catch-all of posts about family, friends, other blogs, technology, politics, churches, travel and the like. Second is “Theological Musings,” which is (supposed to be) more about God than about man. Third and finally we have “Comics,” where I talk about the comic book industry, my favorite new comics, my employer, certain ruffian-run stores… you know, comics stuff.
This accomplishes a few very helpful things. On the writing end, I now have a much clearer palette. It’s a lot easier to decide what to write about when I’ve limited myself to three (four) choices. On your end—and this may be the most helpful thing about the switch—if you only care about one of the three (four) categories, you can subscribe to that category’s feed and only get the posts you’re interested in!
To make it ultra-easy for you, here are the category feeds:
So maybe my New Year’s resolution ought to be to blog more about comics! Because I’m looking over the post count for each category, and that’s the one what could use the most TLC.
Yesterday I went into PHPMyAdmin and repaired a few database tables (some with upwards of a megabyte in overhead). Hopefully that will improve the site’s performance. I’ve been getting lots of MySQL timeout errors here lately.
It’s either that, or move my blog to its own database. (It’s currently sharing with a few others I run.)
Alright! I’ve upgraded to version 2.3, and I’m in the process of migrating from the K2 Beta Two theme to a modded version of Cutline.
Anyway, the upgrade was almost painless. I say almost, because for a few minutes I had an ugly PHP error flashing across the top of every page on the site. And when I logged out at one point, I was prevented from logging back in(!).
So here’s the problem: this server rune PHP5 (5.1.6, to be precise). PHP5 throws a hissy fit if you try to use array_merge() to merge variables that aren’t explicitly arrays. WordPress 2.3’s wp-includes/widgets.php file does this very thing.
So how’d I fix it? After digging around the articles at PHP.net, I went into the widgets.php file and changed line #53 from
$sidebar = array_merge($defaults, $args);
to
$sidebar = array_merge((array)$defaults, (array)$args);
and it seems to have fixed things.
Just wanted to mention this in case other WordPress users like me start pulling out their hair over it. I probably still have a few more issues to track down (seems something keeps trying to use the post2cat table when comments are submitted, hmm…), but I’m happy. 
(Update: still an issue with WordPress 2.5.)
