SNAFU
I finally sat down and put the time into debugging and researching that I needed to do to get the blog up and running again. I'm still not sure what all was changed on the server end that fouled everything up; I'm guessing some sort of directory structure change in addition to the change in the user that services requests (www-data? What's up with that?)—the second wasn't the problem that actually brought the whole blog down, but even if it had been the only thing it still would have screwed up the commenting system.
Anyway, despite not knowing what happened a combination of good luck and my growing familiarity with Perl meant I didn't have to go crawling to an admin whose job doesn't even begin to cover keeping my blog running (but would probably have helped anyway) to get help. Just one of the many benefits of higher education.
After all, I do have a masters degree... in Science!
Category: Geek