Since I mentioned on 18th July that the funding for Island Blogging would only carry us to the end of August I have received two donations totalling £115 which will ensure that Island Blogging can continue until the end of September 2013. If anyone wants to help further and extend the life of IB you can still do so by donating on the Support Island Blogging page.

Thank you so much to to both the people who donated and especially to the overseas follower who donated an unbelievable £100 to carry Island Blogging for a full year. I won’t mention him by name as many benefactors prefer to remain anonymous but I can say that he has been a long term follower of Island Blogging and he obviously derives a great deal of pleasure reading about Scottish Island life (as do hundreds, if not thousands, of other followers).

Island Blogging has been very quiet now for over a year so perhaps this incredible show of support will encourage a few bloggers to put fingers to keyboard and fire up their blogs to let the world know what the privilege of living on one of these wonderful Scottish Islands is like.

Many thanks to reader/visitor David Lakin for a recent donation which helps Island Blogging continue.

The last funding ‘push’ was about eighteen months ago but the funds in hand only cover costs until the end of August - about six weeks - so we’ll soon be needing a few donations from bloggers if Island Blogging is to continue. It costs about £10 a month for the server and that’s all we need to cover.

I have set up a new Twitter account for Island Blogging @IslandBlogging. In theory it should pick up all the posts from Island Blogging shortly after they are posted (the feed is checked every half hour).

So far it looks as if it works but only time will tell. Those with Twitter accounts might like to follow @IslandBlogging.

As it seems to have gone very quiet on Island Blogging over the past few months I have added a feed to the latest posts from the independent island blogs listed on the News and Updates page. You can find a link at the bottom of the front page.

Check it out and you will find that many islanders with their own blogs haven’t posted anything recently either. Maybe island life is just too enjoyable to sit in front of a computer?

Thank you to everybody who made a donation to fund Island Blogging.

The shortfall for the current year was made up by a single donation from a generous visitor from the USA but then several other bloggers and visitors made donations taking us beyond the initial target and well into next year. As a result I have decided to change the way the donations operate and leave the donations page operating all year round with information indicating how long the current funding lasts. If you check the page now you will see that the site is currently funded until July 2012.

Any bloggers or visitors can now make a donation at any time and the period of funding will be extended accordingly. Hopefully that will mean that I won’t have to get out the begging bowl after Christmas each year!

Ten folks in all have made donations so far and I would like to thank each one personally for their support.

Almost a month ago now I made an appeal for donations to fund the site for 2011.

Island Blogging has 71 bloggers (granted not all are active) and in January had over 7,000 unique visitors. The funding appeal appears on the right hand side of every blog with the word ‘NEW’ in bold beside it so it is not difficult to miss. You would not think it would be difficult to raise £100 to fund the site for the current year.

To date we have received FIVE donations and if it were not for a particularly generous donation from one overseas visitor we would not even have reached half of the total required. As it is we still have £30 to find if Island Blogging is to see the year out.

To the five - thank you very much for each donating as much as you have. I would not expect any further donations from you, but what about the other bloggers and all those visitors? Surely Island Blogging has given you sufficient pleasure to be worth a couple of pounds at least?

The link to the donations page is here.

I am pleased to advise that the BBC have agreed to cover the running costs of Island Blogging for 2010. No strings attached.

Carol, of old IBHQ, actually made the offer for last year but by then the costs had been covered by donations so I didn’t need to take up the offer. This year she has once again persuaded her bosses to stump up. Well done, and thanks, to Carol and to the BBC.

Look what can de done when they no longer have to pay Jonathon Ross!

I don’t suppose many of you wander over to the old IB nowadays so will not have seen the ‘final goodbye‘ from Carol.

The BBC won’t be accepting any further ‘contributions’ after 12th February and I assume that means comments as well as posts so if anyone wants to say a farewell to Carol (for t’was not she who shut it down) then it looks like you only have a few days to do so.

Early this morning (4th June) the IB site was attacked by a hacker (thanks to SarahMac and Jill for alerting me to the problem) but I have re-uploaded the affected files and it seems to be working again. The database was not compromised so all blogs should be fine but please let me know if you have any problems.

There were lots of security features in place but it looks like I am going to have to figure out more. The difficulty is to figure out how to exclude hackers whilst allowing full access to genuine visitors. Whilst I sort this out there may be one or two ‘outages’ so please be patient.

I cannot monitor the site 24 hours a day (although it feels like it!) so if anyone finds that the site is down at any time please let me know by email. Sometimes there will simply be general internet problems which will result in your browser saying the site is not responding but if you get through and find errors or find that you are redirected to another site that’s when I need to know.