By a margin of over three-to-one you voted for a fundraiser, so here it is:
1,142 of you voted in favour, so we’re expecting at least £1,142 
We’ve been pondering this week whether or not to hold a quick fundraiser to pay the £750 fine levied on us recently by the Electoral Commission for being a bit late with some indyref paperwork, readers.
(Our feeling is that there’s still plenty money left in the Wings War Chest from this year’s big crowdfunder, but lots of people have specifically asked for one for the fine, mainly to make a point to both the Commission and the little army of Unionist trolls who almost exploded with glee when the news came out late last month.)
But we’re not sure we can compete with this.
Okay, so we’ve tried everything. We’ve read all the papers, we’ve been through all the emails, and we’ve even gone out for a walk, which usually never fails to trigger some cataclysmic political upheaval or animal-sex scandal.
But it didn’t work. There’s still no news, which is probably why the papers – including the FRONT PAGES of the Scotsman and Telegraph – are on an incredible second day of the astounding revelation that someone told someone to f**k off on the internet.
As spectacular and mindboggling as some of the coverage undeniably is – most notably Alex Massie’s barking-mad, lie-filled howlatribe “J.K. Rowling and her heroic attack on the wicked cybernats” (whose title, remarkably, does not appear to be ironic) in ultra-right-wing loonzine CapX – even we’re fed up of reading people going on about us, so to pass the time we’re going to do something else instead.
We’ve got a book to read today, folks, so we’ll be with you later.
We expect it to be in the top three funniest things we read today, but to be honest with you we wouldn’t like to commit to anything more specific than that.
As we write, Alistair Carmichael’s QC is two hours into a seemingly-interminable drone in an Edinburgh courtroom, in a case brought by ordinary citizens against a former government minister funded by a public appeal. Our own recent fundraiser, inspired by a case a world away from such high-minded concerns, closed a few days ago on a phenomenal total of £16,083.
Indiegogo have now disbursed the first half of the money (the rest, specifically that part that was donated by credit card, should follow in the next fortnight), so now we need to decide what to do with it.
The papers these days are full of horrendous stories. For some reason this one just tripped a nerve, and we wanted to do something. Click here for details.
It’s three months since our last traffic-stats update, so we’re due again.
WINGS OVER SCOTLAND JULY 2015
Unique users: 308,314
(up 20,626 on June 2015, up 79,159 on July 2014)
Visits: 1,147,571
(up 90,453 on June 2015, up 229,604 on July 2014)
Page views: 4,732,038
(up 94,495 on June 2015, up 498,717 on July 2014)
Sorry for the wait, readers, but having fancy custom stuff made simply takes time.
However, we’re delighted to report that all of the donor perks for our 2015 fundraiser are now in our possession, and will be winging their way out to generous contributors over the next few days.
We’re only doing stats posts quarterly now, but since the last one we ran was for the January readership figures that means it’s time for a quick update.
Almost 23,000 extra readers compared to last month and nearly 600,000 more page views? Yeah, we’ll take that. (For perspective, here’s April 2014.)
Right. We’ve got some slightly bad news, readers, and we might as well bite the bullet and tell you now. It’s touch and go whether Project Red is going to arrive before the election. (The good news is that going by the polls it isn’t going to matter.) Our vast team of coders is still working on it around the clock, but it’s looking like a tall order.
So we better tell you why.
See you Monday, readers.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
