BurbleChaz

For reasons far too tedious to describe, this blog has been camping out on a Certain Person's very shiny Macbook Pro. Since we now have huge, vast, gushing quantities of bandwidth, I've moved it back onto a proper, grown-up Ubuntu environment. (it may be running on a VM hosted on an Operating System that Dare Not Speak It's Name, but that's just because of my Warcraft addiction and We're Not Discussing That.)

One friendly little thing that OS X does is to make secret hidden backups of your files. It calls them "._<name>. The blogging engine can see throught the whole 'starts with a dot' subterfuge. On reflection, this is probabaly a bad idea. Anyway, these files don't contain the XML that the blog engine expects, so it fell over noisily and obviously, pointing at the file causing the problem. Good Software. Have a cookie.

So, it's easy, right? Just delete the "._*" files.

It turns out that if you get the quoting or escaping wrong there, fun things can happen.

That's what backups are for. *smug*.