We have added 2 new 360 deg virtual tours to the gallery, the new tours allow you to pan and tilt with your mouse or finger to view the virtual tours.

Hartland Moor overlooking Poole Harbour

http://www.virtual-swanage.co.uk/gallery/pan/default.aspx?t=hartlandmoorharbourview

Norden Park and Ride Railway Bridge

http://www.virtual-swanage.co.uk/gallery/pan/default.aspx?t=nordenparkandride

We have updated the webcam page to now include a webcam located at the Swanage RNLI Lifeboat Station

www.virtual-swanage.co.uk/gallery/webcam.aspx

We have added a new page for local photography workshops.

http://www.virtual-swanage.co.uk/thingstodo/page.aspx?p=photography

We have added a new video of the Red Arrows display from Swanage Carnival to the website http://www.virtual-swanage.co.uk/thingstodo/page.aspx?p=carnival and updated the fireworks video to a full HD version.

To view the HD versions of the videos, click play and then select the 720HD option from the quality menu (Cog icon)

We welcome three new accommodation businesses who have chosen Virtual Swanage to advertise their properties.

Number 83, High Street, Swanage 

7 Ulwell Road

Richmond Road

We also want to thank the event’s organisers who have added their events to the event diary www.virtual-swanage.co.uk/events/

Its FREE to advertise your events with us and your events will be seen by thousands of people every day and also shown on our smartphone mobile apps.

We ask all the business owners who are listed with us to let us know if you allow Dogs and other pets in your businesses. We would like to complile a list of pet friendly businesses to add to the website.

Due to the current block from Hotmail for our mailing lists, we are moving our mailing list services to a third party system which will allow many more options for our weekly updates.

You can subscribe to the new mailing list on http://eepurl.com/jZP1X 

For the past week the service providers who run Hotmail, live.com and MSN email accounts have blacklisted our Virtual Swanage email server from sending any messages to people who use email accounts supplied by the above. This means that if you use a @hotmail.com or @hotmail.co.uk or @live.com or .co.uk or msn email account you will not be able to receive emails from our website.

We have been in contact with the service providers of these email services and they claim that our websites have been sending emails to people who haven’t asked for them. Our mailing list system is subscription only and we do not send out messages to random addresses as they have suggested.

They refuse to tell us which emails they have received and to which address so we cannot check to see if the recipients are valid subscribers who have reported our website for sending spam emails.

Today we setup a new email server on a different server from the one which is currently blacklisted and then found that this server was also blacklisted despite the server not having an email server installed until today and it hadn’t sent any emails when we found it was already blocked.

This leads us to believe that the blacklist is much wider than our own servers and maybe affecting many more in the datacentre we use to host our web servers.

Until the service providers for Hotmail, Live.com, MSN etc unblock our email servers we regret that users of these services will not be able to receive our subscription email updates.

If you are one of our valued subscribers and haven’t been receiving your weekly updates we urge you to contact your email provider and ask them why they are blocking the emails you have subscribed to.

If you are one of the many people who have already contacted us regarding this issue, we will post an update on the blog as soon as it is resolved as we are not able to send emails back to you if you use Hotmail, live.com or MSN email accounts.

New plans are online for the Pier Head Swanage development to remove the current Pier Head Building and associated out buildings, erect two new buildings to form eight flats, a wood fired pizza oven and seafood restaurant, ice cream parlour and gallery. Landscape the site and form new vehicular parking in basement with new vehicular access.

The planning application can be viewed on http://planning-purbeck.dorsetforyou.com/planning/PlanAppDisp.asp?RecNum=38171 or http://www.pierheadswanage.co.uk/ which has photos of the plans and 3d mockups of the proposed development.

You can download a PDF of the plans with detailed photos and full details from http://www.pierheadswanage.co.uk/applicationDec2011

Our Android mobile app has some new additions. The app now has an updated Nearby facility which shows the nearest 20 business near your location based on GPS or mobile signal and we have added a new News feed which gets the latest news and events from our Virtual Swanage Twitter feed.

Download the app now from https://market.android.com/details?id=com.virtualswanage.swanageguide