Wings Over Scotland

Running total (updated daily): £28,920 of £29,796 (97.1%).
Donations in last 24 hours: £886.

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Running total (updated daily): £28,920 of £29,796 (97.1%).
Donations in last 24 hours: £886.

Read the rest of this entry →

So, we’ve moved. We’ve done it a couple of hours early as it was getting VERY confusing with two versions of the site live at once and people posting to the new one even though we’d EXPRESSLY TOLD THEM NOT TO 😀

Unfortunately this does mean a small handful of comments have been lost, and may not be coming back. Sorry about that. (We took a backup of them in the hopes we might be able to somehow resurrect them from the XML, but we’re promising nothing.)

Anyway, this is WingsLand’s new home (new RSS feed here). It should hopefully be more stable than the old one, better able to cope with higher volumes of traffic, and more resistant to malicious attacks and threats. There MAY be the odd hiccup as we iron out wrinkles that don’t become apparent until you’re up and running, but hopefully not. If there are, please bear with us over the next 24 hours or so.

(We especially hope Google Analytics doesn’t get screwed up. We simply can’t tell you how impenetrable and horrible Google Analytics is, and if we live to be a billion we hope we never have to try to make it do anything again.)

One bonus is that a number of people who previously couldn’t access the site because work filters blocked it for having the word “game” in the address should no longer have problems. The old site will stay in place for the forseeable future so that people’s old links will still work, but will no longer be updated and comments will be closed.

But anyway, there it is. We’re here, we’re having a beer, get used to it.

The last time we checked in on our fundraising campaign, it was going pretty well.

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NOTICE: We’ll be doing a bit of an internet flit this evening – any comments posted from 12 midnight to around 6am may find themselves going astray in the process. Everything should be better than normal by the morning. As you were.

We apologise to all readers for the extra-flaky performance of the site today. The ridiculously, needlessly convoluted process of moving domain should be complete by tomorrow, and we should be in maximum effect at our brand-new, altogether-more-robust location by Friday. And we thank, once again, everyone who contributed to the donations that made that move possible.

We were pretty stunned after the first 24 hours of our fundraising project, and we’re barely any less dumbfounded after another week.

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As veteran readers will know, we like to keep our blogroll fresh so that it offers only the leanest and juiciest collection of unmissable sites for when you’ve devoured every last page of Wings Over Scotland. This month we’ve had a small prune to make room for some new blood, if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor.

Out go the Herald and Scotsman because, hey, you know fine where the Herald and Scotsman are. That freed a couple of slots which we’ve given to the all-encompassing “Dundee wifey” Subrosa and Liberal Democrat Voters For Independence, both very welcome additions which broaden our outlook considerably.

We’ve also hoofed the Spectator’s braying Fraser Nelson out of the Zany Comedy Relief section for not gracing us with any Scottish-themed doltishness in weeks, and his replacement is a grassroots Labour blog that we think you’re going to love to bits. Ladies and gents, please revel in the positive case for the Union that is Niko’s Bar.

Otherwise, as you were. Suggestions always welcomed.

For all the staggeringly impressive total to date, fewer than 500 of our 30,000+ readers have currently donated even a single £1 to our fundraising campaign. If you’re one of the other 29,500 – and statistically you almost certainly are – there’s a certain lion who wants a wee word with you this morning.

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So, wow. Last month we decided to kick on a little bit as an experiment and put more of our time into the site, and the results were dramatic. But the truth of the matter is that we can’t keep up that level every month, because we have to earn a living. And if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly.

But here’s a thing: supporters of independence constantly and loudly bemoan the lack of a pro-independence Scottish newspaper, or even just a balanced one committed to the simple old-fashioned goals of fair-minded and truthful reporting.

The last attempt to make a print one crashed and burned a long time ago – as pointedly noted in the image above by Kerry Gill, current political editor of the Scottish Daily Express. And the online Caledonian Mercury, despite being staffed by proper experienced journalists, died (though technically its corpse still twitches faintly once in a while) through a failed funding model, having not found a high enough readership to generate sufficient advertising revenue.

The thing is, it doesn’t have to be that way.

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Just a quick bit of infrastructure, folks. We’ve been meaning for a while to get round to sorting out proper author tags, as the WordPress theme the site uses annoyingly doesn’t link from bylines. However, as the sidebar “tag cloud” isn’t big enough to include all our tags at once, even that didn’t quite do the job.

So now in the black tab bar at the top of the screen there’s a handy Contributors page, from which you can immediately and easily locate articles by your favourite WingsLand writers who aren’t me. Want to feature in it? We want to hear from you.