If you’re reading this, you know I rarely visit my blogs. That presents a problem, as I never get the nag from WordPress that my version is so out of date, my site has been taken over by Russian Yakuza using it to spy against the Chinese on behalf of Syria or something. Below is a simple little script that can be thrown in cron and will bug you when WordPress releases a new version and you’ve not updated.
The key here is the URL http://api.wordpress.org/core/version-check/1.0/?version=. Append a version number to the end of that, and it will tell you if you’re at the latest or need to upgrade.