Wardman Wire Magazine

The Wardman Wire is now on a new webhost.

There are still some updates happening, as a few articles and comments have gone missing in the move and need to be retrieved.

There are also a few holes since all the images and multimedia files have not uploaded yet. There are something like 7,000 of them taking up 1.5Gb so it takes some time to re-update the directories from scratch. I have had to reupload everything, and the Internet in the Derbyshire countryside is not very spectacular.

The performance of the site should be sharper, and more importantly it should be more consistent.

I would really welcome feedback bout any problems you discover.

I’ll post about the new host and why I chose them tomorrow.

Things have been a bit quiet here from me for a few days.

What happened to Matt was that the other site I am involved in at present - to do with making sure that the owners who are running down the former SPCK Chain of Bookshops (that readers to the Wardman Wire may well notice but ignore when you visit a Cathedral Town) are held to account - has been going haywire and is taking up several hours every day at present.

That site is the SPCK/SSG News, Notes and Info blog.

That scrutiny campaign involves bringing to light a disgraceful mismanagement process which has resulted in 30+ Employment Tribunal Claims (the number is now 31), an official Charity Commission enquiry, $1.5m of unpaid debts, more than $500k taken out of the same organisation by the management who have not paid the suppliers, and a “bad faith” bankruptcy attempt to avoid those debts - among a whole lot of other things. As happens with these cases, networks turn into hubs and contact points for a lot of different people, especially in this case which is very complex and has been reported for over 2 years now.

We’ve had a lot of brilliant support from bloggers all over, but we are into the real nitty-gritty and it is quite tough and detailed work - especially as most of the media have stayed out due to J Mark Brewer’s habit of making legal threats, or due to the sheer complexity of the whole thing.

So when push comes to shove it gets priority if I’m the only one in the group who can do particular things.

There will be a new column starting on the Wardman Wire on Mondays next week.

It will be written as a tag team by Mick Fealty of Slugger O Toole and Mark Pack, who is the Head of Innovations for the Liberal Democrats.

The column will be about “the things that make politics work online” - which may be websites, or tools, or ways of organising, or anything else deemed relevant. It’s a broad brief, and will also contain a proportion of articles cross-posted here because they both usually write in substantially different niches to the ones covered here.

There may be the odd intrusion from other contributors.

My “supposed to be weekly but didn’t quite always make it” Blog Platform column will be moving back to its old Sunday slot.

This is a quick post to announce that there will be a slight change of “style” in some of our content for the summer season.

First off, David Keen is taking a break for August from his Saturday column, and is handing over to Simon Sarmiento. Simon runs the main UK Anglican News Blog, Thinking Anglicans.

I’m not completely up do date with admin at the moment, having just come back on the air at home (good service from BT repairing the wire) after two days of blogging once a day from a local independent pub (The Bulls Head, Old Denby - Decent beer, decent food and free Wireless Internet - open from 12 noon).

And tomorrow the “Blog Platform” column will be entitled:

“How can Bloggers restore the good name of journalism?”

Controversial, me …?