Glad to hear you haven’t been axed!

I must also apologise: your comment has languished overnight in my blog’s comment spam filter. Otherwise I would, of course, have published your very full and open respose sooner.

I knew you wouldn’t disappoint. As several folk said to me yesterday: you would have been a loss to Brighton political blogland. Thank goodness you’re not going anywhere.

Cheers,

dw

Thanks for your kind words about my contributions to the blogosphere – rest assured, my decision to stop publishing it won’t mean I’m absent from blogland for long. I’m looking forward to posting to http://www.benduncan.org as soon as the site’s up and ready.

In response to your specific questions:

- When will your blog/website be back?

Soon – in the next week or so, I hope, although it won’t be quite the same, of course. The new site will be much more electorally focused: it will be a candidate website, and will be much more centred on talking about polcy and campaigning issues, as seems appropriate for a candidate in a General Election! The aim is to have it all up and running by the time Gord-help-us Gordon fires the starting gun on the election. I’ll let you know when it’s live.

- Are you moving your blog to a new platform?

Yes. I feel it’s inappropriate, in an election period, for me to use a comms platform provided by Google. It would be a campaign donation, in kind at least – hence the move to a locally published site and blogging platform run entirely by the local Green Party, and using Open Source Software.

- Was your blog’s deletion required or suggested by the Green Party or Caroline Lucas? (Let’s face it, you love being controversial!)

No!

- When it returns, as you’ve promised on Twitter, will your blog have all the previous content as before?

My blog posts are daily commentaries – they necessarily become historical once a new one is published! There are no plans for me to carry an archive of my historical mutterings on http://www.benduncan.org – after all they were written for a different site, with different objectives – but if you or any of your readers are really interested they are all at http://bensarchivedposts.blogspot.com

- When your blog returns, will you be in charge as before or will you have to clear posts with Green Party colleagues?

I’ll be mostly in charge – though not entirely as it won’t all be about me. Rather, http://www.benduncan.org will be a campaigning website with details of the activities and policies of the Green Party locally and nationally, as I think is entirely appropriate for a website promoting a General Election candidate standing on a party platform.

It’ll have a broader scope than just my musings – though they’ll be there and I’ll be responsible for producing and publishing them. There’s a legal aspect to all this too: electoral law means, in a sense, my election agent will be responsible for everything on the site too. There will therefore have to be a system in place for making sure all the right buttons of transparency and accountability are ticked and that the site doesn’t say or do anything which could breach electoral law.