I decided to upgrade WordPress this morning, because some of my plugins are pretty out of date, and I figured the latest plugin versions would be happiest with the latest WordPress.  So I did the automated upgrade through the control panel, and presto!  My blog was broken.  Wouldn’t even come up far enough to give me an error message.

Fortunately I had made a backup, so I restored it, and then did the upgrade manually.  No harm done.  It took enough extra time, though, that I never did get around to upgrading the plugins.  I also widened the whole thing from 800 pixels to 1000, so it doesn’t waste so much space on most browsers.  That only required a few CSS changes and editing the background images to stretch the center part, which wasn’t too bad.

During all this, I happened to notice a new incoming link from Funion Follies, another local Quincy blog.  (Thanks, RH.)  He mentions something I hadn’t thought much about before: most local bloggers try to stay fairly anonymous.  I suppose their real-life friends and family usually know who they are, but they don’t put their names on their blogs.  That’s probably smart, but it never occurred to me when I was starting this.  I don’t get into controversial topics much anyway, and when I do, I don’t say anything I wouldn’t say in person.  I’d probably be a much bigger smart-alec if I were using a pen name, so maybe it’s for the best that I didn’t.

Anyway, I thought it’d be nice to list all the other bloggers who have linked to me, so I did a backlink search, and found 1281 incoming links to my site!  Most of those are from me—archives of my Usenet posts over the years, my comments on other blogs, and so forth.  But it’s way too many for me to search through looking for direct links from other blogs.  So I’ll just have to keep watching for them to show up in my Dashboard.  If anyone out there links to me, please tell me so I can add you to my blogroll.  It’s too easy to miss them otherwise.