Where were we?

This site experienced a lengthy outage late last week until this morning. We've lost no data or information during the outage, but clearly we were off air due to the problem for several days.

I'm working with our hosts at Informed Technology to try and determine the cause of the outage. There are some issues with the database server that I hope will be resolved by new hardware. In the meantime, I'll see if I can arrange some sort of a backup plan that at least ensures

1. there's some notification for visitors that there's a problem rather than timing out or providing a blank page or perhaps
   
2. the information on the site is available but blocks any new contributions until the problem is resolved

My apologies for any frustration or inconvenience caused.