Today is the premiere day for the Spitfire Site blog. Almost every site has a blog these days, and I will be spending a few evening this week to get this one up and running. As this site enters a period of significant built-up and (hopefully) frequent updates, I will use the blog to keep you posted about the progress of my editorial work, new additions to the site and so on.

Let’s begin with a piece of general information. This site, although new, is not being built entirely from scratch – in fact, far from it. During my 10 years of work as a webmaster of a highly-successful IPMS Stockholm website (http://www.ipmsstockholm.org/), I have accumulated a wealth of material and experience, including articles, photo libraries, modelling features. As the Supermarine Spitfire and the Royal Air Force have been main areas of my aviation interest throughout the years, a large part of this collection is directly relevant to the subject of this site and will be subsequently published here: detailed images of all Spitfire marks, archive photos, drawings, colour profiles, articles, scale models.

During recent years I have been contemplating starting a new aviation site, and the Spitfire came as a natural choice. First of all, Royal Air Force and World War II in Europe have always been a focal point of my life-long interest in aviation. Secondly, the Spitifre is a widely recognised symbol for aviation buffs of all kinds and nationalities. Last but not least, I don’t think that there is yet a Spitfire-devoted site on the web that I think this immortal aircraft deserves.

Although this site is the initiative of one person, I plan and hope to involve many of my co-writers from my previous engagements. You will also see that this site will always remain open to new contributions – including yours.

My recent work and the one which is bound to provide a good starting point for the Spitfire Site, is the book covering the operational history of the Spitfire in World War II, from its operational beginnings in 1938 to victory with Japan in August 1945. I have started the work on such a book in Autumn 2006, and intend to provide it entirely online for free, with the help of reader’s voluntary donations. You may think it’s a publishing experiment, but I do believe that a historic book can be made much better on the web than in paper form, with all the inherent limitations of that medium and the associated editing process.

The work on the book is progressing well, being about 75% complete. Rather than wait for all the chapters to be completed, I intend to publish the various parts of the book as they get completed and hopefully get valuable feedback from the readers.

All, even good ideas can be improved so I’m eager to hear your opinions and suggestions.