Apologies to anyone who couldn’t get at the site for the previous hours. There was a server error. I’ve now fixed it, I think, and the site should be running. There are some details below the fold for anyone interested in that kind of thing.

The server error was fixed when I commented out a line from the .htaccess file that read SecFilterEngine Off. That line has been there for a long time; I actually can’t remember why I originally added it. I’m not sure why it would now be causing a problem.

There is some circumstantial evidence that it was due to an upgrade by Total Choice Hosting, my server provider. This “comments thread”:http://www.contrastsupport.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=478 from a different host talks about someone who had the same problem I did (500 Internal Server Error across the site) that was fixed by commenting out the line about SecFilterEngine. In that case the cause was a server upgrade that wasn’t fully backwards compatible. I wouldn’t be shocked if that was what happened here. But it could be that I had been doing something fairly non-standard, and it was a fluke that it hadn’t caused crashes before this. In any case, it is working now, and I’m back to being fairly happy with Total Choice Hosting.