Wings Over Scotland

We’ll have some comment on that for you when we’ve prised our jaw off the floor.

It’s time to finish the job.

Just over a year ago now, the readers of Wings Over Scotland quietly revolutionised the independence campaign. When we launched the first ever formal public fundraising appeal for a Scottish political website (indeed, as far as we know the first for a politics site anywhere in Britain), your response was incredible.

Click to go to this year’s fundraiser

Our £30,000 target was smashed, enabling the site to become a full-time professional concern, and others followed in our footsteps. By our reckoning around £150,000 was raised in 2013 for various pro-independence sites and projects, including the Common Weal and “Scotland Yet”, a full-length documentary currently being produced by Jack Foster and Christopher Silver, makers of “The Fear Factor”.

Now we need to do it again.

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Someone just forwarded us the results of a survey by STV’s polling arm Scotpulse. It’s a “wordcloud” of the sort we have on this very site (it’s over on the right hand side and down a bit, marked “Tags”), where the more significant something is the bigger its name gets printed. It pretty much speaks for itself.

You’re the ones who put the word out there, readers. It’s working. Thank you.

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Okay, readers, there’ve been quite a few 18-hour work days recently, and an awful lot of pain-in-the-arse stuff to deal with. Tonight I’m kicking back, cracking open a smooth and spicy Bundaberg Ginger Beer, and playing TxK.

Talk amongst yourselves. Normal service will be resumed tomorrow.

Apologies to readers who’ve been having comments vanish or their details being forgotten this morning. This is as a result of a security measure implemented by our webhosts, because the site is under what they describe as a “targeted” DoS attack.

It’s been going on for some time now (since almost exactly the point when the Scottish Daily Mail began its “cybernats” smear campaign), and although our hosts keep shutting it down, it just starts up again from a new IP address. It’s aimed very specifically at Wings Over Scotland. Someone REALLY wants this site taken down.

We’re working on several things to try to deal with the problem more permanently, and will get everything back to normal as soon as possible, but your comments aren’t just disappearing – what’s happening is that they’re being posted, but the site is being very heavily cached to reduce the damage done by the DDoS attack, so you won’t be able to see them for a while, although other people will.

It’s all a bit of a pain, but try to see it as a compliment.

Apologies to readers who had difficulties accessing any Wings pages this afternoon. Everything seems to be currently behaving, but we’ve had an email from our webhosts (who also, on a different server, host the Conservative Party website, trivia fans):

“The server where your site is hosted is still under a DDOS attack so you may experience some issues with the site today. We’re working on remedying that.”

It’s an interesting development in the light of this recent news, although we’re sure it’s just coincidence – after all, it’s not like a popular Scottish independence website could pose any sort of perceived threat to the British state or oh yeah right.

Incidentally, we had nothing to do with choosing the name, but the server used for Wings Over Scotland, which remains under attack as we write, is called “Truth”.

As several people have been asking in the comments, we’re sticking this on the front page to make things easier for everyone. Kindly reader Ken McDonald (not the BBC’s one, we think) has rather generously designed and commissioned some spiffy Wings car stickers entirely off his own bat, and is offering them up for free. Though we’d hope you’d all be considerate enough to send him a stamped addressed envelope.

Just drop him an email and you can sort out the details.

That’s the best you’re getting for a 10 o’clock joke tonight, we’re afraid. We’ve been beavering away expanding the Reference page this evening, with the result that it now contains a new section – the Repository, which is a collection of various documents pertaining to the independence debate we’ve accumulated over time and which we’ve now stuck in one place for easy finding, should you need to refer to them.

The White Paper is in there, of course, along with many of the other papers of non-specific colours released by both the Yes and No campaigns, various reports by government and independent bodies, some old election manifestos, the full text of the McCrone Report and all sorts of other stuff. If you’ve got anything that you think should be in there, send us a link in the comments and we’ll upload it.

Alert readers will already know how cranky we can get about badly-formatted comments, which waste a lot of our time and are disrespectful to other readers. In fairness, however, our shonky comments plugin didn’t help. So after much poking around we’ve switched to a new, sleeker system. It’ll be second nature to anyone with experience of HTML, but for everyone else here’s a simple pictorial guide.

(Click the image to enlarge.) There are numerous other HTML tags in existence, but the <i> and <b> ones should be plenty for most purposes – don’t go mad making everything purple and different fonts. The new preview pane below the actual comment box shows you exactly how your comment will appear before you hit Submit, so now if you post one with no paragraph breaks in it there isn’t a court in the land that would convict us for smashing your head in with a jagged rock.

That is all.

Okay, readers, it’s time to speak your brains. We’ve been evolving the synergy of the Wings customer-facing recognition interface in line with the leading edge of the zeitgeist over the years, from our early crude banners through to the current clean and eye-catching style, and it’s time to pick the logo that’ll take us through 2014.

Give us your thoughts, whydoncha?

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Is to mercilessly and with extreme prejudice delete the comments of anyone who doesn’t put the right amount of paragraph breaks in them.

Just sayin’.

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Okay. We’re done warming up.

Time to go for it properly.

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