Blogs

Most of our visitors will no doubt have noticed the launch of the 2010 Westminster Manifesto yesterday. Indeed so many of you rushed to take a look at it that the website was largely unavailable for forty minutes or so after the start of the Manifesto launch speech!

For anyone who found themselves waiting, we apologise for the delay, hopefully it was worth the wait once the traffic died down.

You can now use snp.org as a search engine in your web browser. If you are using Firefox, or newer versions of Internet Explorer than you can add snp.org to your browser's search bar, just as you can add google and the like.

Simply visit any page on the website, and then click on the drop down list beside the search box at the top of your browser. You should see an option to "Add snp.org". Simply choose this option and the SNP website will be added to your list of search engines.

Those of you using my.snp.org to send branch emails, and having trouble with the mass email function should hopefully see the problems fixed today.

It's been a while since we've announced any major changes to the website, but today I'm glad to be able to tell you that the homepage for Members has been given a major facelift today. The new Member Hub gives you quick links to our key services, a rolling ticker of by-election updates, and a re-organized structure to make it easier for you to find the information you need.

Due to some technical restructuring we have had to take our general forums offline for the time being. They will return, but perhaps not in quite the same format.

For technical problems please get in touch with our website team by emailing websupport@snp.org

The forum 'General Discussion' in the Activate category has now been renamed 'Activate general Discussion', since a lot of users seemed to be getting confused and using it for General Discussion about the SNP, rather than about Activate. Hopefully this change will clear up the confusion.

All users can now enter a nickname, which will displayed instead of their Login against forum posts and comments.

To set your Nickname click on the 'My Account' link on the Tools menu, then on the 'Edit' tab and then on the 'Personal Information' link. Enter your Nickname in the Nickname field and click save.

You will now see, at the bottom of some news articles, a list of related news articles. These links are automatically generated from a list of the key topics in each article, and should help you find topics of interest in our press releases.

We are not intending, at this time, to add links to older news articles from our archives, only to new articles as they are released.

Welcome to our new look SNP website. We have a host of new features, including new forums, interactive issues, syndicated news feeds and more.

Website members (and of course party members) are able to post on our forums, and to leave comments on many of the pages around the site. We hope that in the near future we will be able to invite you to help us develop some of our key policies.

We also, of course, have a new look and feel, headlined by images of the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood. As well as getting a facelift our website has also changed software, moving from Plone to Drupal.

It's all hands to the pump (or the ropes) as we prepare for launch, which doesn't give me much time to post this message, but it does look like the work of the last 4 months is about to see fruition.

I'm excited!