Howl port - deprecated?

[bw]

> I'm currently running a VM of FreeBSD 8.2. Can anyone point me in the
> direction of how to switch my installation to follow 8-STABLE (I read that
> it's best to check your ports on the STABLE branches)?

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/updating-upgrading.html should have the info you need. Note that STABLE is still considered a development branch, not to be used in production. You can always set up another VM, ofc.
http://tinderbox.marcuscom.com/ might also be of interest to you.