But if your install isn’t up to date — if you’re running an older version — you might want to read this post from HQ that makes an interesting point about car thefts, The Club, and lojack methods.

Afterwards, come back and mull over this quote:

A stitch in time saves nine. Upgrading is a known quantity of work, and one that the WordPress community has tried its darndest to make as easy as possible with one-click upgrades. Fixing a hacked blog, on the other hand, is quite hard. Upgrading is taking your vitamins; fixing a hack is open heart surgery. (This is true of cost, as well.)

Updated!
Someone chats with the 17 year old hacker who hacked his blog and asks why.

Skitch (Mac only)

Skitch is my favorite screenshot software. I use it to show draft sketches and designs to clients. It’s easy to upload to their server (or put in an email or IM or blog, should I want to) and I can either point to the item directly or I can choose to allow comments.

There are several easy-to-do, intuitive editing features built in like resizing and annotating.

Jing (Windows or Mac)

Jing comes from the people who make Camtasia and SnagIt, two well-known commercial softwares for Windows PCs. But Jing is free and allows for both screenshots and screen video capture. You can upload your screenshots easily to their server and (with the paid version) your videos can be sent to Vimeo, Facebook, or YouTube.

Watch the movies

Both are downloaded softwares that you install on your machine. As with all software, be sure to follow good practices when trying something out; just because it works well for us (and lots of others) doesn’t mean it’s a good choice for you.

But take a moment and watch the movies on both sites. It might be just the productivity kick (and frustration reducer) you’ve been looking for.

Watch the demos to see how easy it is to manage this. You should get this even if you’re not a client! Works with Mac, Windows, and Linux machines.

We’ve been using this service for several years and found it utterly dependable. If you’re interested, there are free and pro and business account versions available. They can handle 2GB without even breaking a sweat. Pretty impressive.

I recommend it for all clients who use Internet Explorer as a safer substitute or alternative browser.