Recently my host, for whatever reason decided that it would be a better idea to NOT display errors if there was an error in the PHP code. Therefore if you had a parse error, instead of getting a helpful display that said such and gave you the line number, the page would just show a blank screen.
I have absolutely NO idea why my host thought that was a good idea, but I don't care because there are certain settings in the php.ini file that I can override for my site only.
This article at evolt gives a wonderful overview of what to do and how to do it.
What I did to solve my problem was simply place the following in my .htaccess file:
php_flag display_errors on
Simple as that. You can do this with any .ini setting that is changable by all (some settings ONLY the host can control.)
From now on I'll probably stop bugging my host about such things and just change what I can change myself. There's no reason everyone on my server has to deal with the changes I suggest.