Isle of Wight News on Ventnor Blog

The number of reader comments that are on VB has continued to increase – something that we’re really happy about.

We’re really pleased that people feel that they’ve got a place to come and express themselves – nearly exclusively within the realms of decency and legality!

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Thanks to all of youz, VentnorBlog has just passed over 15,500 reader’s comments.

An amazing number of responses, but excludes all of the responses that we’d had on Facebook and Twitter – and all of the discussion and chatter that occurs on the VB Forum, which itself has over 30,000 posts on it.

Thanks to all of you for sharing your views with the Island … and beyond.

Hope you all had a good Christmas and are looking forward to a happy New Year.

VentnorBlog will be taking it slow this week, but we’ll continue to post stories every now and then – just not at the ten plus stories a day rate that you’re used to.

If we can get around to it, we’ll try and get out some of the yet unheard podcasts that we’ve done over the years, like the one with Tim Burgess, lead singer of The Charlatans, that we recorded shortly after he had curated the BigTop at the Isle of Wight Festival.

If you’re looking for something to do, such as New Year’s Eve events on the Isle of Wight, Events OnTheWight can help you out.

Blimey, last night we passed our 7,000th article!

A quick, back of the envelope calculation puts that at over 4.5 articles a day, seven days a week for the past four years. Given that we started by not posting many stories everyday, I guess we’ve picked up the pace.

Thanks for reading VB over that time .. especially those who contributed to the more than 13,000 comments. Brilliant!

Image: Michael Karshis under CC BY-SA 2.0

People often say that nothing happens on the Isle of Wight but having run VentnorBlog for the past four years, we know this is far from true – so we’ve setup the Events On The Wight Website to prove these nay-sayers wrong.

Crammed full of Island-wide events from Art exhibitions to Zumbatomics (that’s aerobics to salsa type music to uninitiated), we hope that the uncluttered, easy-to-use site gives you many ways to find an event – whether it be by the day, venue or type of activity.

Bringing together all of the experiences we’ve gathered from running VentnorBlog, we’ve worked alongside Birmingham Web developer and all-round super hero Joshua Hart to build what some have compared to London’s TimeOut for the Island.

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We’ve got a very special and (we think) very exciting announcement coming up on VB in the next hour.

If you can’t wait until then, follow us on Twitter.

Image: WoodleyWonderWorks under CC BY-SA 2.0

As you know, we’ve been trying to find ways of continuing to bring VentnorBlog to you, as it appears that one or two of you are quite keen on it – putting aside modesty for a moment, our stats tell us that we’re the number one news and events Web site on the Island.

By way of continuing to provide VB to you, we present – Sponsored Articles – a way for people and businesses to get their message out to the readers of VentnorBlog.

Given the number of readers our stats tell us we have, it’s a highly economical way of highlighting businesses etc to Islanders here and away, as well as to those who visit us.

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This is being published at 09:09 09.09.09. Pretty cool eh?

Have to wait for another thousand hundred years to say that again.

Here’s a great idea …

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Thanks to everyone who have sent us kind notes of support about our coverage of Island news on VentnorBlog. You were particularly complimentary about the 140+ articles we created about the Vestas sit-in.

Having praise sprinkled on you is great for the soul, but sadly it doesn’t pay the everyday bills – donating does.

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If you’ve been checking the site today and wondering where all the VB goodness has gone, there’s a good reason for it not having been around.

With less than two weeks until our daughter, Alpha, starts middle school, we’ve decided to take some time off from VB to make the most of those last moments of sweetness and innocence.

She’s spent most of the school holidays away from the Island with family, to enable us to provide all of our coverage, like the 140+ pieces we did on the Vestas sit-in.

To make up for that we’re cutting back on production at VB this week and changing the work/life balance in favour of the family.

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All of you lucky things who have just had their bank balance boosted by your pay cheque – would you consider putting a little money towards the running of VentnorBlog?

No one who works on VB get paid, so your monies would go towards the costs of running the servers and paying for bandwidth.

Think how good you’ll feel about yourself knowing that you’re helping keep the press free, reporting stories that you might not see elsewhere.

It’s easy to help.

Thanks to everyone who has already shown their support by making a donation or taken a subscription.

image: ctudball

You know that we’re always doing what we can to try and improve your experience with VentnorBlog, right?

We also love that readers get involved with the site. It’s a big driver for us.

With our latest addition to VB, we hope even more of you get easily involved.

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Pinch, Punch, first of the month, no returns until the end of the month morning.

Hey, tomorrow is the first of the month and those of you lucky enough to be in a salaried job will have your monthly pay packet sitting in your bank account by now.

We all know that these aren’t times of plenty – we’re painfully aware of that here at VentnorBlog – so if you use the site – and we know from our stats that loads of you do, with more daily – please seriously consider supporting VentnorBlog with a tiny part of the money that is sitting in your bank account.

To be clear, everyone who works on VB is unpaid for all of the work that they put into it. That’s Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

We’re knocking our nuts off for you here. We’d really welcome your support … and think how great you’ll feel to know you’re supporting a community resource!

Image: Mathieu B.

In our never ending quest to bring you a bigger and better VentnorBlog, we’ve just introduced Nested Comments.

What the heck are nested comments?
Nested Comments follow in the grand tradition of technological solutions that chose names that don’t immediately make sense in English.

We’ll try and explain.

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And …. we’re back to normal order.

Thanks for your patience.

Do please get in touch if find something not doing what it should do.

There’s going to be a break in service this afternoon while we sort out some of the gubbins of the VB back-end.

We normally do this kind of thing in the wee small hours, but today it hasn’t worked out like that.

We’ll be back as soon as we can be.

The VentnorBlog Forum will continue to run in the meantime. Why not pop over there and post something.

Following our posting about being cut off by the IWC Communications Dept, many of our readers wrote to the IWC expressing their concerns about the situation.

On Monday afternoon many of them received the same statement from either David Pugh, Claire Robertson (Head of Comms) or Gavin Foster (Media Manager). This statement was also read out at the Ventnor Town Council Meeting on Monday evening by Ventnor Mayor, Cllr Susan Scoccia.

VentnorBlog didn’t directly receive this document, but it was forwarded to us by supporters.

Having seen it, we took initial legal advice and are now taking more detailed advice.

We believe that the statement about VentnorBlog, circulated by the Isle of Wight Communications Department, contains untrue information and we have been advised that it is potentially defamatory.

Steve Beynon, Chief Exec of IWC, has been in contact with VB and we plan to meet next week to try and resolve the situation.

Hip, hip, hurrah for all of the VentnorBlog Forum members who have posted messages since it was born on 11 October 2005 – the General Chat area recently nudged over the 10,000 posts level. Well done all.

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We’ve noticed on the VentnorBlog Forum recently, that many people are using the board to seek out recommendations.

The variety of recommendations is wide, from dressmakers to builders, aga servicing to pest control.

Because of this, we’ve decided to break out some of these recent posts and start a new board called Recommendations?.
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Regular readers will know that there’s a lot of articles coming out on VentnorBlog daily during the week.

Scarily there’s between 10 – 17 pieces a _day_ flying your onto the site, and we know that it can be a little difficult staying on top of all of these (just imagine what it’s like writing them!).

So you don’t miss out on any stories, we’ve just introduced a newsletter that will deliver a summary of the previous days stories to you — complete with pictures — into your email box before 7am every morning.

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We haven’t written a great deal about the how and why of VentnorBlog, so forgive us this slight indulgence.

How we got here
We’re on the Island due to a night of insanity, when, in the course of a single evening, we decided to sell our place in London, leave and move to Ventnor, lock, stock and barrel.

Sal had never been to the Island and I’d only been a handful of times, starting with the classic school trip, including the inevitable Blackgang Chine visit, way back when I was around ten.

Moving in didn’t go as planned, due to an increasingly awkward house vendor (thanks Eva!)
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The VentnorBlog Forum went bonkers over the weekend with the whole of the first page of the General Chat discussion area being filled with conversations that were active – that’s over 50 separate subjects being discussed over the weekend.

Over the 2+ years that it’s been running, the Forum has gone through busy as well a quieter periods, but never has it been quite _that_ busy over a couple of days.

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We’re finally get back into the swing of things after our extended Christmas break and Simon has been busy adding extra features to the Blog.

Following a suggestion on the forum from Starheliomos, we’ve added the ability to skip through stories simply by clicking on links at the head of the piece (pictured).

In our never-ending quest (or at least it feels like that!) to bring you more, we’ve added a few more features to the site.

If you hold your mouse over the headlines after the main story, you’ll see the first chunk of the text appear in a floating grey box, giving you an idea of what the piece is about. (more…)