Back From Another Outage
Sorry about the small outage over the past few days. It seems my hosting company has a bug in their PHP5 compilation which was causing the process to crash everytime someone attempted to access the front page of this site.
I know it's not my code as this was working fine the other day and I've not changed anything. What's more, this exact code runs fine on another server hosting my tech blog.
I've worked around the problem by switching back to using PHP4 for time being. I'm not going to bother logging a ticket with my current hoster as I plan on moving some time soon, and given their history of incompetence, I very much doubt they'll be able to get to the bottom of it anytime soon.