Tonight I tried to drop by my blog and found that it was out of commission! No WordPress pages would load (although non-WP static HTML pages were fine), instead giving me a browser error message explaining that the server returned no data. I checked the filesystem and found the files intact and not recently edited (I had been hacked once several years ago and thought this might have been malicious as well). I headed over to the database (fortunately phpMyAdmin was working) and looked around the DB a bit. The last change there was from 2/25. ಠ_ಠ
A little bit of Googling led me to http://www.colinmcnulty.com/blog/2008/07/08/solution-to-wordpress-blank-screen-of-death/ where I found the solution. Fortunately, my problem was not the same as his, but following the steps that didn’t work for him did work for me. Evidently something went wrong with my plugins; disabling them all directly from the database magically restored my web site. I logged back in, upgraded from Word Press 2.7 to the latest 3.5.1 (big jump!) and here I am. In response to my snark on Facebook about everybody letting that go almost two months without telling me, my coworkers persuaded me that I should do more self-promotion and update more often, so here’s a post. I try not to post here unless I have something useful to say (no “I ate a piece of toast today” updates on this blog; that’s what Facebook and Twitter are for), but hopefully that link will help some poor soul whose Word Press site spontaneously decided that it didn’t need to serve pages anymore.
Just, y’know, ignore the bit at the end where it turns into a sales pitch. ಠ_ಠ