Woke up this morning and accidentally switched on the news, foolishly thinking “It happened yesterday afternoon, surely they’ll have run out of completely inane drivel to say about it by now”. Brain now turned to semolina. Can barely construct sentences, let alone analyse anything. Be with you in a bit.
Okay, it seems safe to say already that reaction to the idea is very positive, so why waste time? The new fundraiser page is now live. The more money we raise the more questions we can ask, so let’s see what we can find out.
[EDIT: Base target crushed in 70 minutes. Wow. But keep it coming, folks, because we’d love to get to 10 questions, which will take a total of about £3,600.]
For the sake of tidiness, comments on this post will be closed – please carry on commenting and suggesting questions in the original thread.
Recently we’ve seen quite a few people on social media wondering why there hadn’t been any opinion polls on independence published in a while. We thought it was a bit curious ourselves, so we rang a few polling companies with a view to commissioning our own one, but Panelbase told us they were doing fieldwork on one as we spoke, to be published roughly a week today (they’re every two months).
But even though we don’t need to do one on the straight Yes/No thing now, that’s no reason why we can’t take it upon ourselves to ask a few other questions.
We blame the inefficient private-sector monopoly (ie me). But we think we’ve finally ironed out various technical and procedural hitches, and are finally ready to send out the special rewards for the most generous contributors to the excitingly successful fundraiser we ran back in, er, well, let’s call it “Spring”.
If that wasn’t you, don’t click below or you’ll only be sad.
Sorry, folks – dealing with a major unforeseen disaster today. Nothing to do with the site, and nobody’s dead or dying or anything, but it’s probably going to take all day to clean up the mess. See you tomorrow.
We’re naturally nosy sorts, and with literally tens of thousands of readers having come to the site since our first major reader poll, we’ve decided it makes more sense to keep it open permanently so that new users can express their views too.
So if you only took part in the more recent second one, now’s your chance to tell us what you think about a whole range of subjects. And if you’re too new to have even voted in that one (or just forgot, or couldn’t be bothered), we’ve merged it into the first one, so you can do both at once if you like.
The poll can now be found under “Survey” in the top menu bar, and is here.
The mechanics of our job got a lot harder and more unpleasant this month. First, an unknown issue has made Firefox (our web browser of choice) almost unuseable for the past couple of weeks, due to a catastrophic performance collapse that means we have to sit around for 20+ seconds every single time we open a new page (or edit one) before we can do anything in it, with every open tab frozen in the meantime.
As our work involves a lot of jumping around and cross-referencing numerous sites, the cumulative effect of the constant slowdowns is frankly horrendous.
(We’ve found other people with the same problem – “It’s like wading through glue”, said one – but no explanation, and therefore no imminent prospect of a fix.)
Then today Echofon, our preferred Twitter client – vital for staying on top of news as it happens, crowdsourcing research and communicating with both readers and public figures – also died. It’s been on borrowed time for a while, no longer supported by the developers, but today Twitter switched off the API that made it work.
So we’re sending out a distress call.
No cause for alarm, just some inescapable events. Probably no posts until later this afternoon, so catch up on the stuff you may have missed over the last few days. THERE WILL BE A QUIZ. (There probably won’t.) (OR WILL THERE?)
It’s been several months since we last did a major reader survey, so we’d quite like to poke our noses in again and get your views on a few issues that we didn’t ask about last time, as well as learning a little more about you personally. Some of the questions are directly relevant to the constitutional debate, some aren’t – we’re just curious. Feel free to skip any you’d rather not answer. As if you needed us to tell you that.
(NB All votes are anonymous, in case that’s important. We have no way of knowing how any individual reader voted on any question.)
You’ve probably noticed there’s been quite a lot going on here recently, but we’re not neglecting the wonderful people who contributed to our hugely successful fundraiser.
The first version of our Credits page is now live.
We’ve received another letter from Ian Taylor’s lawyers. You can read it below.
A few days ago we bemoaned the state of the Royal Mail under its partial privatisation by successive Labour and Tory governments, and noted that often the post didn’t arrive until well into the afternoon. And sure enough, it was only a few minutes ago that we picked this up from the doormat.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
