I had to reinstall the wordpress.root tool to gain access to the prefs set up page. After I did that everything proceeded as expected.
The reason I’m doing this is twofold; one is that it appears that blogs.opml.org is experiencing server problems and two is that I’ve been using Radio 8 to publish Gary Secondino’s weblog for years and although it still works fine for me I feel the need for change to something new.