Mike Taperell’s blog

In a way it's the holy grail of blogging. A blog that regularly makes a good income and all you have to do is write it! OK, let me tell you a story...

I used to write about alternative health and holistic matters - my lovely wife Avril is a reflexologist and interested, too, in holistic health - and so I began a couple of blogs that featured just one topic each. It's called niche blogging.

It was a great idea and I began to develop these blogs, writing mainly from my own knowledge since it's a subject that interests me, although I'm not a practitioner.

Two years down the line I was making small amounts of money and a few people were interested enough to read the blogs but the big bucks eluded me. Why was this?

With the benefit of hindsight, and having taken the trouble to read about blogging and think about it, I think I know where I went wrong. I had the right idea, I went about it the right way and the blogs I produced were good blogs (I am a writer so that part was not so hard). I got this right because it was what I had concentrated on and what I had thought about.

What I had not concentrated on was the choice of subject matter and the promotion, both initial and subsequent, of the blogs. The result, as I say, was success but not great success.

I guess, like most people, I thought I knew what I was doing and went ahead and did it but now I'm going to start in a slightly different way. I'm going to put up a series of posts on the whole process of choosing, starting and writing a blog but on my blog on Blogger.com. This blog is a personal blog while that one is more a 'work' one.

I have pretty much most of the first section of ideas written in draft and hopefully there will be some feedback to help me along. Of course, it benefits no only me but everyone who contributes and who reads what is there, so I am hoping for a lot of support.

At the end, I hope, I can develop some great niche blogs for myself and, of course, for those who tagged along as well. So, if you want to glance at the first post, have a look at my Blogger blog at http://taperell.blogspot.com. I guess it would be best to bookmark it, too, and check back from time to time for updates and further posting.

The pictures that accompany these posts are from a visit to a nearby lake at Earlswood in the Midlands area of the UK and were taken a couple of years ago. It's a great place and this was a good day out so it brings back some pleasant memories for me.

For those that are following the series (OK, that was a joke!) the next instalment of the review of the SeaMonkey suite has been posted and is on the Youk site here. 

The week it's about surfing with SeaMonkey and it includes a still photo (sadly much optimized) of a dramatic video I happened to be watching as I surfed, so that is worth a look.

The next article in the series, which is all about SeaMonkey's email capabilities, is in draft and should be finished this week ready for posting next week. The posting date will be either Tuesday (this is the proper posting day) or Monday.

On a different subject, just as it's Memorial Day in the US, so it's a holiday here and, predictably, the weather is warm but wet with a drizzle of steady but pleasant rain yesterday to benefit the new plants I put outside the house. These were planted earlier in the week in the hot (for the UK) weather and which I hope to be a blaze of color within the next few days.

Although the weather is wet, we don't have the terrible storms that I see rumbling their way across the midwest - I'm looking at usatoday as I write this - and I'm sorry to see that there have been fatalities and other injuries so I will do some emails when I finish here to check that everyone there is OK. The weather does seem to be getting worse by the year - or maybe it's just that it's so well reported now.

OK, so that's it for this holiday day! I have some other chores to do on the computer and then I am off upstairs to spend some quality time on the radio. We had some good conditions here in Europe yesterday which resulted in some good contacts so maybe there will still be a little of that left for today.

Just lately I have managed to wandered, quite innocently since I was just following links while surfing, into two websites laced with trojans. And not just one trojan but a whole - what do you call a horde of trojan horses - of course, a corral of trojans, each one armed to the teeth and ready to install itself on my machine.

The first time I reminded myself gently to take a little extra care when surfing since it could so easily have been avoided. I was searching and I always use McAfee Siteadvisor (especially after I wrote an article on it and saw how good it was) and I went to a site that had not been tested. Yes, I know, it was my own fault.

The second time was even more stupid. I followed a link on a blog on Vox without searching for the site's name first. No excuse! I asked for trouble and I got it!

So, I have learned my lesson. I have written myself a note and stuck it on the monitor but not this monitor. It's ham radio day today and I am upstairs waiting for a satellite to appear and writing this in between, but I have stuck it on the monitor downstairs.

Seriously, this is something we have to watch so carefully these days. Until recently, unless you were very unlucky, you didn't have to worry too much but now more and more websites contain trojans (in corrals or single).

In fact I, of all people, should have been more careful since I had just finished, and have now posted, an article on the Youk site about such similar things called 'The Phishers New Hook'. It's a good article, it's all about phishing but it includes trojans and it's worth a read. It's only a short article and the link is here.

Oh, if you want to look at my article on McAfee Siteadvisor to help protect you while you search and surf then the link is here to save you searching for it yourself (and maybe running into further trouble on the way). It's a good program and, what's more, it's free.

I'm in the process of producing a short review of the SeaMonkey suite of programs for the internet column I write on the British Youk site. The link to my column is here.

I'm a sort of computer dinosaur, I guess, having started in the early 1980s and having been hard-wired to the internet since the beginning of the 90s. That means that I remember the old Netscape Communicator suite of programs that appeared in 1997 as an upgrade for the Netscape 3 browser. What I liked about Communicator was that it was a 'complete' internet suite in that it had a browser, an email client and, most important of all, a program to make web pages.

SeaMonkey follows this path closely and with a similar set of features which makes, I think, for happy and easy internet use.

But what suits me doesn't suit everyone and it can come as quite a surprise to watch the way another person surfs and the way that they swap from program to program and, indeed, use the programs.

With this in mind, I looked at the suite from a slightly different viewpoint. I tried to answer the question: “If I download it, what will I get and what will it do for me?” In other words I looked at how the program works 'out of the box' for someone who didn't want to mess with it but wanted just to use it.

I'm useless at predicting how popular programs will be (or otherwise) but it's worth having a look at my articles because I have a feeling that this suite is going to become really popular. The first article is online now and it's here and a new one of the five instalments will be posted each week.

On a similar note, have a look at my other blog which has a note about a new browser and media player called Songbird. I am predicting a great future for this, too, but, as I say, we will see!

I've got a new camera. It's not a fantastic digital SLR but it's a better-than-your-average camera and certainly better than the Olympus point-and-shoot I was using.

For the initiated it's a Samsung Pro 815.

Now it might not be a fantastic Nikon DSLR (OK, that's what I really wanted) but it certainly looks as if it is and this was the first hurdle I found when taking it out today for the first time.

My Olympus is small and fits nicely into the palm of one hand. In fact, by running the tiny strap over my palm, I could hold the camera in a very discrete way and then, when the time was right, raise my hand, reveal the camera and shoot.

Not so the Samsung! It's a big, hefty camera that even my huge hands can't disguise. It's a camera that says: “Hey! I'm big, look at me! All shiny black plastic and lens!”.

So I crept out of the car park in our local village with my son as a foil to protect me and began taking photos of buildings. You know those cameramen you see taking news photos with great movie cameras strapped to their shoulders? Well, that was me. It was as big and as bulky as a top rate movie camera and, what's more, it did it's best to slip from my grasp and tumble to the floor!

But I persevered and took the camera to the local church - now there's a quiet and tranquil place to practice - and, slowly, things began to come together. The sun had almost risen from the clouds of the morning and the warmth and familiarity of that place (it was a quiet place of childhood peace) brought confidence to trickle back to my fingers.

In another half an hour we completed our walk and headed home with, I hoped, some good, solid architectural shots to grace my monitor but, on transferring pics to computer, I realised my that this, sadly, was not to be.

The spirit that protects photographers (come on - there must be such a spirit) had deserted me. My carefully cosseted lens always kept safe behind it's cap and never knowingly exposed to drips or splashes of any kind had acquired a milky white mark of some substance that showed on every picture.

Undeterred I paraded them for my son to see. “It's a good camera, Dad,” he said. “It'll be all right next time.” He's right. Bad luck strikes the faint of heart, next time I shall be bold and the pics will be perfect! We will see.

Pic is of the church at Coleshill.

Hi, my name's Mike Taperell and I'm a writer. I write about health and holistic matters, and I also write about computers and the Internet, which is the fun side of the job.

Currently I live in the middle of England, on the outskirts of the lovely City of Birmingham, with my wife, Avril, who is a reflexologist, and our son, Luc, who is grown and at university.

For fun, I like geeky things like computers, ham radio and electronics but I have a camera, too, and I like taking pictures when I have the time.

You can catch my columns on Youk by going here and my personal blog by going here which has links to some other blogs I write.