Tuesday 5 June 2018

Ups and downs



It takes a long time to build a site. I’ve been writing on my present site since around 2012. I’ve written over 300 articles. Each one usually takes between two and three hours to write. Sometimes it comes easily, sometimes it doesn’t. Some things that I spend quite a bit of time on I decide to discard. I try always to say something original. There is simply no point repeating what you read in the papers.



Why write at all? I frequently ask myself this question. My main motivation is that I built my site from nothing. For the first year or two almost no-one read what I wrote. But gradually I built a site which was first read by thousands and then by tens of thousands. More people have read my articles here than anything else I have ever wrote. That’s quite something.

But after years of effort suddenly I find I can’t share my articles on Twitter. I have a number of ways of sharing. I share on Facebook. I share on Google Plus, I share on the Daily Globe site every Monday. Sometimes what I write is good enough to appear on Think Scotland. But Twitter is absolutely crucial to building the momentum that sometimes means one of my articles gets a lot of readers.

I have no idea why I can’t share links from my site on Twitter. It may simply be chance. I have written to Twitter using the following link:


Perhaps others could do the same on my behalf. If there are enough voices, it might make a difference.

My whole motivation comes from writing for my own site.  I’m always happy to share with anyone so long as it doesn’t involve too much work for me, but my goal for a long time has been to reach one million readers. That may not seem much to some, but it is a lot to me. So I don’t want to move to another site. I want to keep my own site.

Here is what I plan to do. I have a new Blogger site. I am going to use it to show the link to my site. That will be all that it will show. So anyone clicking on a Twitter link will only have to click twice to get to my site. Likewise if they wish to share one of my articles, which by the way is massively helpful, all they will have to do is to use the Wordpress link in their Tweet.

There are a few more things that might help. You might consider friending me on facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100009547098705

I post all of my blogs there.

You can also consider following me on Google plus


Finally do please follow me on Twitter. I’m sorry I don’t always follow back. It can sometimes be difficult to distinguish between genuine followers and spam ones. But I will try to follow back more.

The key to building an audience for an article is the comment Tweets and Retweets from readers. Without them I am writing to myself.

I have been trying to take my site in a different direction. I can’t write about Scottish nationalism every week. Besides I think sometimes we help the SNP if we spend too much time analysing there latest reasoning for why it would be a good idea to partition Britain. We know their real reason.  

What I am trying to do is to develop a form of politics that lacks a voice in Scotland. I’m Pro Brexit, Pro UK. I would like lower taxes and for public spending to form a lower share of GDP. I am sceptical about much of what the Left has been up to in the past thirty years not just in terms of politics, but in terms of Western culture in general.  I am fairly socially conservative and moderately Christian. I think it is important that the UK Government takes control of our borders so that we can control who arrives here and who can fish in our seas. But I think it is vital that we are kind to everyone who lives in Britain and that we treat everyone who lives here as equally British. If conservatism is to succeed we have to be attractive and we will never be attractive by being nasty about other people.

My hope is that there will not be another independence referendum. But sites like mine may well be useful in the future. This is why I intend to keep the site ticking over with articles about matters other than Scottish politics. We don’t know what the future will bring. I am optimistic. The key is to get the UK out of the EU as completely as possible and then deprive the SNP of their independence supporting majority in the Scottish Parliament. If we can do both of these things, we will be more or less safe. Until then we must be vigilant.

The biggest flaw in the Pro UK mind-set is that while the Nats beaver away and go on marches and pay their charlatans to write about secret oil-fields, we go to sleep as soon as we begin to feel a bit safer.  

What I write is frequently controversial. Sometimes I set out deliberately to provoke. I want to tackle difficult topics using reason, but also by using my ideas about morality and philosophy in general. I like to mock things that I find ridiculous, but I don’t want to be unkind to anyone. There are good people who support Scottish independence and good people who support every mainstream UK political party.     

I hope that it wasn’t a Scottish nationalist tried to prevent me Tweeting my articles. I find some of these people to be very angry indeed and a little bit desperate. It’s worthy of pity and not much more than that.

So I will keep writing so long as enough people keep reading. I may take a break from time to time. Writing can be tiring. Share what I write as much as you can. Tell friends. Post on forums. Tweet and Retweet.

There aren’t that many Pro UK writers in Scotland. We all have our talents and our flaws. We are all needed. Someone really should tell Twitter that it can’t simply prevent me sharing my site without realising that it might have a potential consequence. What if there were ever to be another independence referendum and all it took was for one Scottish nationalist to complain to Twitter about my site or someone else’s? There is an important issue of impartiality at stake.