Over the weekend my weblog, which is handled by WordPress 3.1.3, stopped responding–any attempt to load a page in the weblog or the administration panel resulted in a blank page. A bit of Googling turned up that this is a known problem called a “white screen of death” which affects WordPress and has multiple causes. Fortunately, I was able to fix it by renaming my plugins folder to “pluginsoff,” at which point I could log into the administrative interface (with all my plugins disabled). After that, changing the name of the folder back to “plugins” restored everything to normal function.
My best guess is that the WPtouch plugin, which I had updated shortly before I noticed the problem, either didn’t like being updated or got corrupted somehow. I’m not sure I’ll bother with further investigation, since the plugin is meant to show a nice iPhone/iPod Touch-friendly version when my weblog is viewed from those devices, and I haven’t really used my iPod for anything but listening to music since I bought an iPad.