I now have Drupal installed to serve web pages for my technology consulting profile. I’m yet to put any real content on there, but the exercise in building the website was worthwhile. I was surprised at the speed of configuration (mine is not the most simple system now), and also impressed at the availability of themes. I was also impressed at how easy it is to theme plain HTML pages outside of the CMS with freely available CSS themes.
I’ve also gone through the update process for Diaspora* quite a few times, and the instructions work well. The only note is that they should also point out it might be a good idea to update gems at the same times.