My friends Acacia and Ray gave me a bamboo cutting board for my birthday or Christmas a couple of years ago. Since then, my other cutting boards have sat lonely and neglected. The bamboo board has several advantages. First, it’s very hard, so even rough chopping doesn’t cut into it much. There are a lot of shapes available, but mine seems perfect - small enough to fit many places on the counter, rounded corners that are pretty and nice for holding, an overall square-ish shape so it’ll stand up for storage and drying. This board at Amazon appears to be about the same size and shape as mine. They’re also very inexpensive, which will be nice if I ever need to replace mine.

After the recent flurry of WordPress upgrades I started looking for an easier way to upgrade. This post at techites.com was a good start, but this comment on the post, using rsync, sounded much easier. Here’s the workflow I figured out:

• wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip (download the latest version)
• unzip wordpress-XXX.zip (extract it)
• mv wordpress [your-site's-folder-name] (rename the wordpress folder to the name of the folder your blog lives in on the server)
• rsync -avrz [your-site's-folder-name] [username@server]:[path-to-blog-folder] (update the remote folder with the local folder)

Repeat the last two steps for each install you want to update. I’m sure it’s possible to write a script to do this for a whole bunch of installs at once if desired. You may want to test all this out on your local testing server beforehand.

Update: Jonathan’s right, Subversion is a VERY easy way to update WordPress…once you’ve got it set up. This Codex page describes the process. It’s easiest to do if you’re either just setting up your blog or if you only have a couple of plugins or themes installed. There are other benefits to using Subversion. You can easily switch from using the current release version to using the bleeding edge version, for instance to test out a release candidate. The WP Subversion repository also wasn’t affected by the recent security exploit, so there may be a security advantage.