I have to confess to being incredibly lazy. I’ve just grabbed the most popular current WordPress theme and applied it to this site. I wouldn’t have even gone to that much trouble except that I was seeing a disconcertingly blank page after upgrading, and didn’t expect to be able to find the old theme without at least a little bit of scrolling and clicking and typing and that sort of thing.
As it happens I quite like this new theme. And I have to say that WordPress is making impressive progress in the direction of usability. I have to respect any piece of software whose developers have put such effort into facilitating my inaction.
Update: There seem to be some problems associated with the upgrade or theme change. I’m seeing ‘Precondition failed’ errors sporadically, and I’m getting reports of pages displaying with no style at all. I’ll look into it when I get the chance. Only clue so far is that highlighting the location bar and hitting enter fixes things, but reloading doesn’t. That indicates that something is trying to play games with the HTTP Referer (sic) header and is dropping the ball.
Update2: It turns out that the mod_security Apache module was enabled and didn’t like the word ‘sex’ in the title of this post. Any time the URL for this post was in the Referer header, that request was considered referer spam and was served a HTTP 412 response. I disabled the offending module with the line SecFilterEngine Off in the site-level .htaccess file.