Keeping up with the piping world can mean visiting a growing number of websites, checking competition calendars and hoping you haven’t missed news about a favourite piper or band.
The Piping Wire is a new, free service designed to make that easier – and to grow with the community it serves.
By Henry Edwards
Made by enthusiasts, for enthusiasts, the Wire brings together news, competition coverage and events from across the piping world. Readers can personalise their feed by choosing their interests and following pipers, bands and organisations.
The principle is straightforward: help readers find the reporting that interests them and take them to its original home. Each story carries a short introduction of a sentence or two, with a clearly attributed link to the publisher’s article. Clicking the headline takes you straight there.
Sites such as Piping Press remain essential to the community. In fact, The Wire depends on the work of these publishers and aims to help more readers discover it, bringing fresh visitors to the original reporting.
Alongside the news, an expanding calendar and the interactive Piping Graph help readers explore events, people and the connections found in published coverage.
The Wire will only be as useful as the coverage it can draw upon and the feedback its readers share. It is launching as a community effort, with an open invitation to help shape what comes next.
Publishers, bands, associations and event organisers are warmly invited to get in touch about making their news easier to discover. Readers are equally encouraged to suggest sources, flag gaps and tell us what would make the site worth returning to. Suggestions go privately to the editorial team for review.
Join The Piping Wire, create a free account and choose your interests. Try it, tell us what you think, and help make it a useful part of our piping community.
Our thanks to Piping Press for welcoming this introduction and supporting the launch – an encouraging example of the mutual support we hope The Piping Wire will help to build.
About the founder: Henry Edwards began piping as a schoolboy and to rekindled his playing by regularly joining The Pinstripe Highlanders. He serves on the committee of The London Recital and has recently taken on the role of co-piping steward for the Highland Society of London. He created The Piping Wire to help fellow enthusiasts stay connected with the people, events and reporting that make the piping community so rich.
