I just took a big jump and upgraded to WordPress 2.6.3 from 2.5. Except for one brief moment of panic because I hadn’t finished uploading the new files for the root directory yet, everything went very smoothly. I have activated the Akismet plug-in and am hopeful that this will significantly cut down on the spam. I’m afraid that in my haste to clean out old comments I accidentally marked a legitimate comment as ’spam.’ I apologize to the author and hope that s/he visits again anyway.

Update: Well that was pretty awesome. I was able to find the legit comment in my old email and restore it. I guess it was still somewhere in the database, even though it didn’t show up on the Comments dashboard.