A Simple Life of Luxury

Woohoo, on his nine-month birthday Morgan slept through the night for the first time ever. We didn’t hear a sound from him (other than the odd cough) from 7pm when he went to bed until 7am when he woke up… Bliss!

I did of course still have to get up in the middle of the night once to check that Morgan was OK and once to let the cat out, but a full nights sleep by Morgan feels like something of a milestone. I’m not sure how Morgans feels about it all though as he has been pretty grumpy today.

Well, this was the view that greeted us in Borth this morning looking out towards the beach and the sand dunes. Looks as though the weather forecasts were correct and they are forecasting more for today as well.

BBC: North, west and mid Wales are likely to be most affected overnight with heavy snow unlikely in the south east.

With temperatures below freezing expected, councils are getting ready to grit roads and send out snow ploughs.

More from BBC… Wales prepares for arctic blast

Met Office Warnings:

Severe Gales
Affecting Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion, Conwy, Denbighshire, Flintshire, Gwynedd, Isle Of Anglesey, Pembrokeshire & Powys
Northwesterly gales, with gusts to around 70mph, will affect coastal areas exposed to the northwesterly winds and more generally over ground above 600 metres, for the rest of Thursday and into Friday morning.

Issued by Met Office.
Valid from: Thursday 24 November, 2005 at 16:33
Expires on: Friday 25 November, 2005 at 09:00

Blizzards & Heavy Snow
Affecting Bridgend, Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion, Conwy, Denbighshire, Flintshire, Gwynedd, Isle Of Anglesey, Neath Port Talbot, Pembrokeshire, Powys, Swansea & Wrexham
Heavy snow showers and northwesterly gales will give blizzard conditions at times through Thursday night and into Friday morning. Heaviest snowfall is expected over hills and mountains where 15-25cm of lying snow is possible in places. Up to 5cm of lying snow is likely at low levels inland. The public are advised to take extra care.

Issued by Met Office.
Valid from: Thursday 24 November, 2005 at 21:00
Expires on: Friday 25 November, 2005 at 09:00

I was playing around on a website yesterday that seems to be one of those sites that is something of an internet phenomenon. As with most ‘internet phenomena’ it is a very simple idea that has just caught on and now has a cult following.

The site is http://www.43things.com. Put simply it allows you to register and record a list of 43 things that you would like to achieve. Other people can then read your goals and give you a ‘cheer’ if they think your goal is a particularly admirable one. Alternatively if they have already achieved your goal they can post to say so and give you some encouragement or advice. A simple idea and one that doesn’t sound too interesting, but once you get onto the site you just can’t help looking through the goals which range from the trivial such as ‘do the washing up’ (yes, I achieved that one today!!) through to the grand such as ‘rid the world of poverty’.

You’ll find plenty of people wanting to achieve things that you have done. For me many of these were things I had taken for granted and didn’t really feel were an achievement. However, now that it is someone elses goal it gave me a sense of satisfaction at having achieved it.

You’ll find plenty of people with similar goals to yours, again these were goals that I hadn’t ever really thought of as being something I was working towards, but once you see them written down they suddenly take on a little more importance. Seeing these goals on the screen may even give you renewed enthusiasm to actually get around to achieving them. Whether or not it makes a difference is of course up to you but it is still interesting to see what people around the world are trying to achieve.

It also helps to put things in perspective, are the things you are worried about at the moment really THAT important? Surely you should be spending more time trying to achieve some real goals rather than just existing from day to day. What have you achieved today?

For me I also like the fact that the internet allows such simple ideas to become huge. No doubt the people behind it are making lots of money from it and good luck to them. It is an original idea that has been well executed.

Well, after much nagging by Anna and Anna’s Mum I finally went to the doctors yesterday to see what they had to say about this cold/flu that I have had for the past couple of months and haven’t been able to shake. Morgan has had a pretty bad cough / cold as well so we took him along too.

I hate doctors, so Morgan went first. After a few checks the doc decided that Morgan had a nasty cold but should be OK, so we just have to keep an eye on him and be nice to him (as we always are!). Me next… Being a typical man I expected them to say ‘it was just a cold’ and I’d get over it in good time. But after lots of deep breaths and an examination by the doctor and a medical student they decided I had a chest infection. I must admit, all the deep breathing while they were listening to my chest made me feel a little faint which is pretty abnormal for me, so I’m sure they are right and there is something wrong. I’m now on a course of antibiotics and still feel fairly ill, a little weak and something is making me feel a little fuzzy!

Oh well, at least I have a proper excuse for moping around the house feeling sorry for myself!

Here in Wales and elsewhere in the UK we are all obsessed with the weather… Even a quick read through this weblog will prove this as there seems to be quite a few references to what the weather has been up to. Maybe its because we are quite exposed here and really feel the full force of the weather, but whatever the reason it is certainly the hot topic of the day almost everyday.

Of course, I am probably more obsessed with the weather than most as my passions of windsurfing, kitesurfing and surfing depend heavily on what the wind and surf is up to, so I always have an eye on the weather. Many of the people who regularly visit my Forces-of-Nature coastal sports website are similarly obsessed with the weather, but are not so fortunate to live here where the action is. Because of this Forces-of-Nature will soon be adding a new ‘Live Weather Station’ to the list of online services it offers. As you can see from the photo I have been up a telegraph pole setting the weather station up. It will take me a while to get the website side of things up and running as I first need to source and set-up a PC dedicated to running the weather station which can sit in a corner somewhere crunching the data received from the sensors and uploading it to the internet.

I’m hoping to go live with the Borth and Ynyslas Weather Station in the next 4-6 weeks. When it does go live the weather station pages will offer up to the minute live data on wind direction, wind speed, temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, rainfall and various other weather parameters. In addition to the live weather data I’m also hoping to provide data on weather extremes (daily, monthly and yearly maximums and minimums), trends (over various timescales) and various graphs and charts based on the data collected by the weather station. Once established the weather station should be useful for people living in or visiting the Aberystwyth area or anywhere along the coast of Cardigan Bay.

I’ll keep you posted with the progress, and hopefully I won’t have to go up that telegraph pole again for a while!!

I don’t believe it…. I never get colds and rarely get ill, but so far this autumn I seem to have had one really bad cold after another and once again I feel as though I’m dying! The only explanation I can think of is that Morgan catches them at nursery and brings them home to me. If that is the case then all I can say is I feel for him as ii isn’t surprising he gets a little grumpy now and then if he feels anything like I do.

I’m going to have to battle on though. Being self-employed means I don’t get the luxuries of sick pay and holiday pay, so I can’t afford not to go to work. Sitting in front of the computer doing website design isn’t too bad. I can even put the wood-burning stove on, make myself a nice mug of honey and lemon and take my laptop into the living room where I can… work from the comfort of the sofa… Thanks to the wonders of wireless broadband.

However, today is my day of outdoor work, mowing lawns, cutting down trees and other gardening chores… I shall have to see how I go, but I’m sure it won’t do me much good the way I’m feeling this morning.

I think I have given my cold to Anna’s Mum as well who is off home to the Isle of Man today… No doubt she’ll be taking some of my bugs with her to infect the island with!…. Unlcean, Keep Away!

Anna’s Mum is visiting us at the moment from the Isle of Man, so Anna and I took the opportunity of having a baby-sitter in the house to look after Morgan and had a rare evening out.

It isn’t often that we go out, not only because we have Morgan but also because we can’t afford to go out that often, so such nights are quite a treat for us and therefore all the more appreciated when they occur. We went to the Tynllidiart Arms in Capel bangor and had a lovely meal. I woud certainly recommend it, the fillet steak I had was delicious and there was certainly plenty of it. So much so that unfortunately we couldn’t quite manage a dessert as well.

Thankfully when we got home Morgan had been good and hadn’t woken up once so Anna’s Mum will no doubt babysit again for us in the future.

That seems to be all we have had lately. Autumn is definately here and winter is just around the corner. It’s that time of year when this part of the world seems to have closed down. The shops that appear in Borth over the summer have gone without a trace, the windows on the sea-side will be boarded up as protection against the storms and there is now no sign of any tourists.

For those not used to it, autumn here can be pretty bleak. The days seem to last for 5 minutes, on the worst days the light index is particualrly low and as we all know, Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) probably affects many of us to a certain degree. Those long sunny days lazing around on the beach are now long forgotten and for many the prospect of things geting colder, darker and the days even shorter is enough to drive them to despair.

But, I love it!! What more could we want, loads of wind for windsurfing, the break from the tourists is welcome and there is something particualrly warming and homely about drawing the curtains as it gets dark at 4.30pm, adding a few more logs to the fire and settling in for the night while the wind drives rain against the windows outside.

Travelling becomes difficult at this time of years too, with floods often making it difficult to get anywhere. The usual 2.5 hour journey to ‘civilisation’ can take 6 hours! For those of us who would really like to be a little more remote than we are the winter certainly makes us feel that way.

We should spare a thought for those who have been directly affected by the bad weather and flooding though, such as the owners of the house in Aberaeron whose wall collapsed under the force of flood waters.

Since Feb 2005 I have been experimenting with making a little income from websites. Not by working on them and building them for people which is one of my ‘proper’ sources of income, but by actually building sites for myself that then generate an income.

Now, before you get excited, I’m not making loads, in fact the sites are only just paying their way, but I thought I’d tell you about them as there is certainly potential in the techniques. In fact, quite a few people are making small fortunes using these techniques and a small minority are making HUGE fortunes from it.

At the end of the day the techniques really all boil down to placing advertisements on your website, but there are several different ways to go about this. The two I have been using are affiliate assoications and Pay Per Click Advertising. I have also in the past few days started using a new scheme which is in effect a combination of the two.

Affiliate Associations
There are lots of online businesses offering affiliate associations that you can sign up to. Once signed up you can place links to products offered by these businesses on your website and if people click on the link and subsequently buy the product you can earn some commission from the sale. One of the first companies to use this marketing technique and one of the most successful affiliate programs is that offered by Amazon. The box to the left is an example of just one of the links that the Amazon Affiliate program can serve. As you can see, you can link to individual products as a way of recommending them to your websites visitors, or you can add automatically generated links to your site that Amazon update with bestsellers, new releases etc. If a visitor to your site clicks on this link and then buys a product from Amazon you will earn commission for referring them to Amazon. Commission rates vary from around 4% to 7.5%.

I have tried taking this a step further by setting up online ‘affiliate stores’ such as ‘Web Design Books’. This website uses a set of scripts to obtain product information direct from the Amazon database and present it in the form of affiliate links arranged by category within an online store. The advantage of using such a script is that the information is kept up to date with the Amazon database so once set up the store is in effect maintenance free… You should be able to just sit back and watch the money roll in. Of course, it isn’t quite that easy. In order to make any money from it you really must put a lot of time and effort into promoting your new web affiliate store. Without any visitors you aren’t going to make any commission, and this is where the hard work comes in. Those people that have the time and expertise to promote their affiliate store can and do make a decent living from them. Unfortunately I don’t have the time to invest in such promotion so my store sits there making the odd sell now and then… Maybe one day I’ll have some time to make more of the site.

There are plenty of other affiliate schemes, I have set up an affiliate website selling website templates, which again makes the odd sell now and then. Click here if you want to sell website templates yourself. There are also sites that allow you to set up affiliate associations with large numbers of affiliate schemes and manage them all from one centralised location (I have tried this but have as yet made nothing from it).

Overall affiliate schemes can and do work, but in order to make any money from them you have to actually generate sales through your website.

Pay Per Click Advertising
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertsing is similar to affiliate schemes as you place adverts on your website, but you get paid everytime someone clicks on the advert regardless of whether they subsequently buy something. The grand-daddy of all PPC schemes at the moment is Google Adsense. The beauty of this scheme is that it is context-sensitive. As a web master all you have to do is place some code from Google on your website and it will automatically work out what the topic of that page is and serve relevant adverts to your web-page. Hopefully these adverts will be of interest to your website’s visitors and they will click on them earning you a small revenue each time they do. The amount you actually earn depends upon the advert and how much the advertiser has bid to get their advert to the top of the list.

I have implemented Google Adsense adverts on my Windsurfing, kitesurfing and surfing website and after a slow start and some tweaking with the positioning they do generate a little bit of income each day. Certainly not enough to make much difference to my annual income from real work, but they at least cover the cost of hosting for the website which was before costing me a fair bit to run.

Of course, if you have an extremely popular website or lots of them, then there is no reason why contextual adverts such as those offered by the Google Adsense program shouldn’t generate you a nice little income.

Interactive Merchandising
I’ve recently started experimenting with a system provided by Chitika called eMiniMalls. These are in effect a combination between Affiliate Marketing and PPC marketing. This system can be contextual in the same way as Google Adsense adverts or can be based on your own set if keywords. (Note: Adsense terms and conditions state that you can’t use other contextual adverts on the same page so if used in conjunction with Adsense, Chitika ‘eMiniMalls’ must be set up in non-contextual mode). The example to above shows a Chitika eMiniMall which should be showing a product along with the description of the product and the best deals for places to buy that product. Revenue is earned on a pay-per-click basis.

So far success with these has been limited, but I think that is because all the products and best deals are American based with prices in US Dollars, whereas the sites I have placed them on are UK biased.

Overall, it is definitely possible to make money from your websites. A popular site should bring in a steady trickle of cash and maybe pay for the hosting and domain name. But, with a little bit of effort, several websites and lots of promotion to bring traffic to your sites you could make a living out of it…. I’m still a VERY VERY long way off that and shall for the time being at least have to continue to work in order to keep the wolf from the door. But who knows, the income I do make from them may one day at least go someway to helping my family lead a ’simple life of luxury’.

…the 5th of November… To be honest I almost forgot it was Bonfire Night tonight. Well, it is excusable seeing as we had the community bonfire party last weekend to make the most of people being around at the end of half term. There will of course be a firework display in Borth tonight, but the weather is so miserable that I think we’ll give it a miss. I for one could do with an early night anyway and after a good days windsurfing at Ynyslas I think I should sleep well. That is of course assuming that Morgan and Robbie allow me to do so.

I do enjoy this time of year though, it is now nearly 5pm and it is fairly dark out there already. These early nights certainly make it feel as though winter is on the way. I am now quite looking forward to the winter and those nights sat in front of the fire. Who knows, we may even get a decent snowfall again this year. The air temperatures are falling, as is the sea temperature and everyone on the beach today were in their winter wetsuits. Some are even beginning to think of each session as being their last for the winter. Not me, I go out all year round whatever the temperature, but this time of year has to be one of the best as the water is still relatively warm and the autumnal low presures bring plenty of wind our way.

It was pretty busy on the beach today. Certainly a big change from when I first moved here about 11 years ago when there would be just me and one or two friends out on the water… I think the secret is out. No doubt those that stay on the beach in their camper-vans will have remembered that it is bonfire night and will be having a little firework display of their own in the car park…. I think I’ll watch from the comfort of my sofa!!