After months of being ignored, my poor old original website is being yanked back into the land of the living.    I have chosen to rebuild it as a blog as this seems to suit my way of working.  Over the coming months and years I will build this into a resource centre for all of you who want to build an income from the cyber-world and get some of those fabled internet dollars flowing in your direction, to support your family and close community.

We all know there are some tough times ahead.  However, everything I have read and watched; online and offline, suggests that business on the web will be one of the strong points of any recovery.  It is also one defense against some of the protectionist sentiments being trumpeted by narrow minded fools.  It is at times like these that people can turn in on themselves and close ranks.  Exactly the behaviour that turned the crash of ’29 into a long drawn out depression. As well as the potential economic nightmare, it isn’t too big a stretch of the imagination, to see the potential for another breed of extremist nutter getting a toe hold on the ladder of power.  And we don’t want to see that do we?

Passing on the skills of doing business on the web to as many people as possible is, I pray (and I’m not religious), one way of building connections between people and communities.  Because of some spectacularly successful horror shows, too many people see the threat to civilisation as being Muslim.  It’s amazing how short people’s memories are: have we forgotten what a threat a bunch of warring Christians were, just a few short years ago, in Northern Ireland?  By the same token, isn’t it impressive how bitter bitter enemies have taken that deep breath – that step back from a brink and begun to untangle the web of historical difference and bitterness.  The beginning of peace in that troubled province is a reminder that we need to see further than the knee jerk reaction to the latest outrage.

The real threat to our world and all our various civilisations is ignorance and greed.  Let’s start here and spread the goodness and wealth that exists in this world.  If you’re a humanist,  (like I’m beginning to think I am ?), a religious zealot or,  far more likely, an ordinary person trying to live your life a bit more comfortably; get on board and learn to earn.  When you’ve got enough, teach someone else to earn – to compete with you and spread the wealth far and wide.  There is still more than enough cash flowing round the world to keep everyone in clover; recession or no recession.

The great strength of the human race is our variety- it’s our differences that actually make us strong.  It’s our adaptability to new circumstances that enables us to turn disaster into opportunity.  We should value our differences and support our obvious communities – as I am trying to do with my community based website for Stanwix, where I live, in Carlisle in the UK.  It’s a commercial website in one sense because it needs to earn a few quid from local businesses advertising on it.  At the same time it’s very much a labour of love it can’t possibly make me a living, but it is the main contribution I can make to the life of the place I love to live.  As well as our obvious communities we need to be open and accepting of the ones we maybe don’t quite “get” or feel comfortable with.  With the major proviso that they don’t deliberately harm  or offend those around them.

If you are getting started in the online business world, I’ve got some headers and photos you can use.  The headers are free, but the original photos are sufficiently precious to me that I do ask you to pay a small charge to have them and use them.  I call the collection Atmospheres, because each photo and the headers that were plucked from some of them were utterly fantastic days.  Mostly, but not exclusively, out in the hills; these were special days!  I hope you are interested but no worries if they don’t ring your bell.

Well it’s getting late and I’ll have to put this first post to bed.  Thanks for dropping by and having a browse: see you again soon.