I took a short week off and flew down to San Diego, to hang out with some cool friends over the Thanksgiving holiday, and just got back home. I had a great time. We did the Sea World thing, hit the tattoo shop, went crazy on hotel boxing matches and swimming in the coldest freakin' pool ever in Southern California, ate Thanksgiving dinner, all the good stuff. Many people (even family) have been trying to reach me and probably wondering why they have not heard back from me for a week or two – Sorry to everyone, I was gone and badly (but necessarily) distracted, and that’s pretty much why.

I am not sure why, but for some strange reason, pretty much every time I go away to any place where I won’t be using a computer for more than a day or two (as well as at other random, unpredictable times) my blog software installation (dasBlog) freaks out and starts creating zero–byte XML content files on the server with wonky dates, which effectively renders kaput dasBlog’s ability to render any content for the site. Hence, the blog goes bye-bye, or at least everything except the theme shell does. That happened again while I was away, but it’s back to normal (if you can call it that) now.

I know this unusual problem has been seen before on other people’s dasBlog driven weblogs, but only very rarely and without any real ability to reliably reproduce the problem. If anyone has the same problem (where you have to go and delete the bad files to make your site start working again) please let me know, and maybe we can figure out why its happening.

It could very easilly be a change I made, but since I know of at least one other person who has experienced the same issue, I'll throw out the question... There are a few things I can think of about my blog that are non-stock, and I am not sure whether or not they might be related:

• Older content on the site was created programatically using a home-grown tool that a friend cooked up while I watched and learned.
• I have modified the search stuff a little in the template
• I have definitely modified the site template itself, quite a bit
• Any other changes I can think of were made after the problem started happening