Update below
Reports in blogsphere about some WordPress blogs being hacked got me alarmed. So I decided to upgrade mine from whatever version it was at (2.3, perhaps, whatever the current version was a year ago) to 2.8, the latest, but certainly not the greatest.

The upgrade process wasn’t hard, just a bit tedious. After posting a new entry and it not showing up in Google Reader two days after the fact, I felt something was not right.

So I clicked the feed link directly, http://www.haidongji.com/feed, and got the error below:

Warning: include_once(/home/xxx/public_html/wp-includes/pomo/mo.php) [function.include-once]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/xxx/public_html/wp-settings.php on line 307

Fatal error: Class ‘Translations’ not found in /home/xxx/public_html/wp-includes/l10n.php on line 407

The strange thing is that I did have mo.php in the right place, under wp-include. So I went to Feedburner’s site, now part of Google, and it didn’t have anything useful there. My sixth sense told me there might be something fishy with the whole Google feed integration business, so I decided to restore the .htaccess file to the state prior to Feedburner integration, and see what happens. Lo, it worked! That was last night.

Today I saw the comment page link was broken. After clicking the recent comments link on the right side, there was a 404 page not found error. Once again, I invoked my psychic debugging skills and decided to revert .htaccess to the one generated by Feedburner a few years back, the one I ditched the previous night. Behold, it worked!

Now some additional gripe regarding WordPress 2.8: why do we need to make the dashboard admin page more complicated than necessary? The 2.8 dashboard looks busy and noisy, and it made it considerably harder to go to places I wanted to go. After finally locating the settings page I am after, I need to scroll all the way to the bottom to view it! Keep it simple, please.

Update: It turned out I claimed success too early. After I reverted to .htaccess from Feedburner, I noticed the feed was not refreshed with the latest entry. So I went back to the original .htaccess file, where comment page was broken. I googled around and realized the permalinks was the culprit. So I did chmod 666 .htaccess, went to my WordPress admin page, saved permalinks changes, then chmod 644 .htaccess, and now I am back in business.