Wings Over Scotland

Crivvens, we do ramble on a bit, don’t we?

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We’re going to enjoy this one while we can, because there’s a big barren fortnight across the last week of December and the first week of January when no politics happens at all, so we probably won’t see these sorts of numbers again for a while.

Crivvens.

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Something rather odd happened over on our Facebook page this week. It’s the most sparsely-populated outpost of the Wings empire, (because it’s mostly just links to articles here), and the average post there is doing well if it’s seen by 2000 people and gets five or six comments.

But yesterday, after running this article, we thought it might be fun to turn the two maps into one of our celebrated series of “leaked Better Together posters”, so we quickly knocked up this image and posted it on the Facebook page accompanied only by the words “Another Union dividend”:

And then things went a bit mad.

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It’s the 1st of November and we almost forgot to do a stats post. Tch, eh?

We’re calling one of those numbers another landmark.

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This seems to count as a pretty big landmark.

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Well, it’s been quite a week, readers. Over the course of the last seven days, Wings Over Scotland – and in particular myself, as its editor – has been subjected to an unprecedented series of smear attacks from several groups of alarmingly angry people, from “Better Together” activists (sometimes in unholy alliance with a small handful of confused, naive young SNP student sorts) to senior Scottish journalists, failed Tory election candidates, psychopathic stalkers and Rangers supporters.

I’ve personally been called – in the space of just that single week – homophobic, transphobic, misogynist, racist, disablist, ageist, fascist, sectarian, a rape apologist, anti-English, anti-Welsh and a hate-preaching bigot. All are entirely untrue, of course.

(Just about the only people I’m apparently NOT prejudiced against are left-handed unicycling vegan budgie-owners from Fermanagh. Which is doubly ironic, because I really loathe those smug, cack-fisted carrot-munchers.)

If you want to know why, look below.

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We’ve been in a bit of a stat-wading frame of mind generally today, readers, so we hope you’ll forgive us for one last toot on the trumpet after a fortnight that’s seen every readership record on the site trashed in spectacular style.

It’s not even our fault – an alert reader on Twitter pointed out our soaring rating on global web traffic tracker Alexa.com over the course of the last few months (since we became wingsoverscotland.com), so we couldn’t resist a bit of a nosy poke around for the rankings of other Scottish politics sites and, well, these were the findings.

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We try not to bang on about our readership stats so often these days, but as some mainstream media types have been casting doubt on our figures this week and we’ve just passed a couple of nice round numbers, we thought you might like to know.

We’d like to say a big “Welcome!” to the 15,000 brand-new readers who’ve joined us in the last 30 days, a big “Thanks!” to those of you who were here already, and an extra-special one to those of you who told others. Keep spreading the word, folks.

In the whole of 2012, Wings Over Scotland was visited by 141,012 unique users, who made just under 2.6 million pageviews. In 2013 so far, we’ve reached 285,581 unique users who between them racked up over 6.6m pageviews.

Just wait until we really get started.

An alert reader today pointed us towards internet traffic analysis site Alexa.com, and in particular its statistics for the Yes and No campaigns’ official websites. There was an interesting quirk (or at least one that might pass for interesting in the silly season).

Can you spot it?

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It’s “Follow Friday” on Twitter (as it is every Friday). So for those of you still scared to take the plunge into this most modern of communication tools, we thought we’d put together a handy one-stop list of 50 of Scottish politics’ most significant tweeters, and see if we can get you started.

(Click the images to visit the pages.)

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Littered with bank and school holidays, and often with the first glimpse of summer luring people out of doors away from their TVs, newspapers and monitor screens, May is usually a pretty slow month in politics. (Except in election years, of course.) We’re human too, and the last 30 days saw fewer posts on Wings Over Scotland than any this year – 83 compared to the Jan-Apr average of 101.

So we’re extra-chuffed about this:

That’s a whopping 15% increase on last month’s all-time record, and over 8,300 more unique readers. (Number of visits was also up slightly, with total pageviews marginally down as you’d expect from the decreased post count.)

As ever, thanks to everyone who makes the site worthwhile by coming here to read it. We’re taking a research day today, but no more slacking after that. There’s work to do.