Campaign for an English Parliament

Firstly, a brief explanation of why the CEP site disappeared:

Regular purveyors of the CEP blog may have noticed that it disappeared on Saturday and still hasn’t come back.  A brief explanation …

On Saturday the company running the data centre that the servers were located in told our hosting company that the power station supplying the building had had a fire which had knocked out a transformer.

On Sunday they told the hosting company that actually it was them that had the fire, that the 2 web servers hosting our site had gone up in smoke.  Oh yes, and also that the off-site backups they were being paid to do daily hadn’t actually been done and everything had been lost in the fire.  Sorry about that.

Obviously this is a bit of a blow.  I have some backups but not enough to restore the blog to its former glory.  I’ve personally lost the West Midlands NO! site and my wife’s card business which was located on the same servers.  Which means I’m going to be busy for the foreseeable future.  The hosting company have been really helpful – they had new servers up and running by Sunday evening and have been in touch pretty much constantly since it happened.

The CEP now has a holding page with a list of branch blogs which will be spreading the word while we work on getting a new CEP site up and running.  If any CEP members are interested in writing a branch blog then let me know and I’ll set it up.

As you can see, we have a blog again.  This was the most important part for us to get working again because it’s the part of the website visited most.  It’s still very much a work in progress so if you have any feature requests or suggestions or the layout doesn’t look right then leave a message in the comments.

If anyone is interested in the geeky side of things, we’re running Wordpress 2.3.3 with Simple Forum, Paged Navigation, Download Counter and Sub Page Links plugins by Yellow Swordfish for extra functionality and the template was Blueline-10 in a former life.