After putting his daughter to bed at night, armchair blogger Eliot Higgins works into the early hours studying videos of Syrian weapons.
The 34-year-old spends his evenings researching and writing the Brown Moses blog – a site which analyses internet clips of Syrian attacks, weapons and even assassinations.
However, his hobby recently took a more serious slant after his analysis of a Croatian weapons cache made international news.
Earlier this month, Eliot, of South Wigston, found evidence of Croatian weaponry which had fallen into the hands of Islamist fighters.
Following the discovery, the unemployed former media studies student has featured in articles in the New York Times, the Guardian and on CNN and the BBC.
Now, he is planning on making his blog a full-time venture – and says he has even turned down an intelligence analyst role to continue writing.
Eliot said: "I was all ready to take up the new job with a private firm, but the contract said I had to give up the blog.
"I tweeted that I was giving it up and I got a lot of reaction from people saying I needed to keep it going – I've been getting a lot of publicity, so there are a lot of people interested in what I do."
The father-of-one has received a £5,000 donation, which he says is from an anonymous source, and needs to double it in order to take on the blogging role full-time.
"Publicity is not difficult – it's the fund-raising and getting people to donate which is going to be hard," he said.
Eliot has calculated he needs another £5,500 to fund the blog for six months.
"There's tons of stuff which I miss due to the sheer volume of videos, so I need to put in as much time as I can," he said.
He is planning to set up an webpage where people can donate cash to fund the project.
Last month, he had 80,000 hits on his site. In a bid to increase his visitor numbers further, he is hoping to translate his posts into Arabic.
"I've been getting a lot of interest from places such as Saudi Arabia," he said. "I've got a translator, but some terms are quite technical, so it's not as easy as just rewriting it. I've also been contacted by a literary agent who said they want me to write a book about my blog."
www.brown-moses. blogspot.com
