Wings Over Scotland

The records have been tumbling like skittles at Wings Over Scotland – we’ve just notched up our biggest day of page views ever (last Friday), our biggest week, and our biggest month. Especially heartening was the fact that no single post provided more than 18% of the traffic for any one week, or more than 6% of views for the month – we were already comfortably through the 200,000 barrier even before Friday’s popular and widely-linked piece on the SFL’s farcical “reconstruction” proposals.

We also smashed the 1000-Twitter-followers barrier (despite a furious Twitstorm from No campaigners last Tuesday), set a new high of almost 23,000 unique users, and exceeded 50,000 visits for the first time. Thanks so much to everyone who’s come to the site, and particularly to those who’ve tweeted links, posted Facebook likes and all the other stuff that’s helped our readership grow by 1,675% since the turn of the year.

Now for the (slightly) bad news.

If you visited WingsLand last week, you can’t have helped but notice that it’s becoming a victim of its own success, with the server going up and down like Hearts in the 1980s, leaving the site frequently unavailable – albeit usually for no more than a couple of minutes at a time. (One flakeout annoyingly costing us half an hour’s unsaved work on a post, which we’ll hopefully return to next week when we’ve stopped swearing.)

This is a result of our cheapo bargain-basement web-hosting, which promises “unlimited” bandwidth but shuts you down whenever you exceed a certain percentage of your shared capacity. And despite what the unfortunate tech-support people we harangue might tell you, we can’t really complain – you get what you pay for.

The only long-term solution is to move to a proper host, but that costs money and we’re skint (a situation which may not be entirely unrelated to spending so much of our time banging on about independence like idiots rather doing paid work to earn a living), so like all good Scottish subsidy junkies we’re getting the hat out.

We now have a Donate button, where readers finding themselves burdened with annoying excess cash can chip in a couple of quid to help us fund the higher running costs of a better service. (Several alert viewers spotted it while it was being tested and have already sent money, to whom we offer extra-special thanks.) There’s no obligation whatsoever, but any and all contributions, however small, will be gratefully received.