AEM publishing Instance is rendering blank HTML

[Community_Admin]

I have recently created a site with CQ5.4 using the cq-quickstart-5.4.0.jar executable jar file.  In my file structure I have an author folder and a publish folder in which I am running my author and publish instances respectively.  I have been able to make changes to the Geomtrixx site and see the changes reflected on the publish instance, so I know the replication is working.  However, when I create a new site and "Activate" it (doing so through both WCM and the "Tools->Replication->Activate Tree" mechanism it shows in the UI that it was published.  The logs also indicate that the replication was successful.  However when trying to access the pages on the publish instance, blank HTML pages are renderd.  Oddly enough the pages are not 100% blank, they render with an HTML, HEAD, META, and BODY tag, but with no content in the tags.

This indicates to me that some sort of replication has occured, because the page renders blank.  If I type in the URL of a page that doesn't exist, the publish instance redirects to the Geometrixx site. 

I have searched the forums and can't seem to find anyone with a similar problem.  I also came accross the following article http://dev.day.com/content/kb/home/cq5/CQ5Troubleshooting/replication- stuck.html which sounded like it might help but did not address my issue.  I am guessing the issue is something small and relatively simple that I have overlooked, but can't seem to pin point the problem.  Any information would be helpful.

[Community_Admin · Accepted solution]

Now that I understand the problem and solution, I will share it in more detail with the community for anyone else that may come accross the same problem.

The issue was that after creating a new site on an author instance, when viewing it on the publish site the page was not rendering correclty.  The visible symptom was that initial HTML tags (for HTML, HEAD, META, and BODY) were being generated, but the content was not be filled in. 

I did Activate my content properly, however, because it was a new site, and I had generated new components and site templates which resided in the "apps" folder and assets in the "etc" folder, they were not available to be rendered and so the HTML page was blank (because they could not be found on the publish instance).  What I did was use the "Activate Tree" under the Tools section to publish content in /content/mysite.  What I missed was using the Activate Tree to publish items I had created in /etc/designs/mysite and /apps/mysite.