Here is a simple Gist (originally created by https://github.com/Abban) that lays out all the necessary hooks to start customizing the new ‘Theme Customizer’ in WordPress 3.4
Here is a simple way to nicely handle fatal errors in PHP. I’ve tested this in PHP 5.2, I believe it should work in 4 but I’m not totally sure.
After a lot of struggle, the site is up and running. For the server being over 6,000 miles away (5,910 miles to be exact), response times are pretty good.