Apparently, if you put a close php tag: ?> twice in a row, or inside and otherwise closed set, this will break your functions.php page, which will in turn break your WordPress website. You get a nice white page in Firefox, and a 404 error in Explorer. This apparently has to do with the server side scripts that interact on the fly with the php file scripts. Not sure about that to be honest, I’m taking it on faith from my web development and web hosting man David Nuckolls at GloryKidd Technologies.

This was caused by my attempt to change the default gavatar by modifying the functions.php page with a bit of code I found in the WordPress help fourms. Anyway, the only solution we, by which I mean Dave, found was to delete the active theme. Reverting to the last unaltered backup of the functions.php did not work for reasons not understood by either of us. While deleting the active theme did not itself solve the problem, it did restore the network administor portal, which allowed me to go in and install and then activate a theme that did work. So I was down for roughly 30 hours, and now have to re-customize the blog theme options.

Lesson learned? Don’t flippen mess with the functions.php page Send that one over to Dave.

Oh the joy of learning through breaking things.