In the Spring of 1997 an idea was born between myself and Scott Hatton who was at that time the technical director for an Internet Server in the Western Isles of Scotland. Scott proposed that they provide the bandwidth if I would recruit some people and start up an Internet magazine. So Scottish Radiance was born. I programmed the first issue and I will be the first to say that the magazine was pretty shabby in its appearance but our saving grace was a great crew of writers who were willing to volunteer their time. The first issue came out in June 1997.

Scott eventually left Eolas, the server in Stornoway Scottish Radiance called home, and I purchased the URL scottishradiance.com. Scottish Radiance became independent. The decision was made at that point that Scottish Radiance would not carry advertisement and would be financially supported by selling books and music. The sales do cover our operating costs but we still are an all volunteer writer magazine. We could have not made it without the volunteer writers which kept sending those stories in every month. Many writers have come and gone but they all were great and developed a large following.

We can not believe the number of readers who puruse our pages. It varies from month to month but we have had over one and half million many months. We have a family which get our Reader's letter every month and some of the people on the list have been there since the beginning. Scottish Radiance has received hundreds of awards for excellence in design and content. So many awards that we have stopped putting them on the Internet as it takes up way too much bandwidth. We want to thank everyone who has honoured us with their awards. We really do appreciate them.

This year we missed our first month of publication because our archive server went off line without our knowing. We have consolidated everything on one server and hopefully that will never happen again. Currently Scottish Radiance has over 3500 unduplicated pages which makes it a huge site to maintain and to run.

I had no idea when we started eight years ago that our idea would grow into a valuable resource on all things Scottish. It is used by people and schools all over the world. The most popular categories being Gaelic, History and Scottish music.

Happy Reading,

I love to hear from you so contact me by Email at sharma@sharmakrauskopf.com

You can find more articles in the archive under Island Miniatures/Lighthouse Letters.

I have three books which are directly related to this column. The Last Lighthouse tells how we bought our lighthouse, the day by day journal of a year at Eshaness entitled A Year in the Lighthouse and in Scottish Lighthouses our lighthouse is featured in the 31 lighthouses presented. You can find out more about these books and others I have written at my official author web site.