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Here’s the mid May time capsule including photos from the Kew temporary garden outside the British museum, goslings at Alexandra Lake, Wanstead Flats and the London Orbit Tower.
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I’ve been requested to make a tutorial about how to install WordPress child themes so here goes.
A WordPress Child Theme is a Theme which inherits some or most of its workings from an existing theme on the same installation. It’s like your own copy of another theme, a fork, a duplicate, but still relying on the original theme for many things.
The reason why you need a child theme is so that you can make changes to the theme files, such as editing the stylesheet or adding code into the Header or Footer files, which won’t be overwritten if and when the Parent theme is upgraded.
If you understand Cascading Stylesheets ( CSS ) you can make changes and additions to the stylesheet which customise or improve the appearance of your site. You may also need to add bits of code into the header or footer files in order to call a script which can’t be done with a plugin, like Tynt or Crazy Egg for example. Or you might know just enough PHP to be able to go through the main files reducing the number of database calls to speed up your site by replacing the generic with the specific. If you don’t use a child theme then you run the risk of losing all your customisations when the parent theme is updated, or else getting stuck left behind with an out of date version of the main theme’s code.
To make it as easy as possible I’m suggesting the use of a plugin to create your child theme, but for now, I don’t believe there is a way to do everything ( including the creation of new theme files) entirely within the WordPress dashboard yet, so you may still need to complete one or two simple steps using either the filemanager in the cPanel dashboard at your webhost or using FTP.
The plugin is called One-Click Child Theme and you can find it here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/one-click-child-theme/
Install the plugin, activate, and then navigate to Dashboard, Appearance, Themes
With the theme you wish to create from active, you should now see an additional Option next to Widgets and Menus called Child Theme – see screenshot below:
So now you click on the link “Child Theme” which creates and activates your new child theme for you, after asking you for a name and description. Your new child theme will also have the link “Child Theme” but don’t click on that ever, or else you’ll create a grandchild, not really a good idea.
If you now go into the WordPress theme editor, Dashboard, Appearance, Editor you’ll see that there are only two files available with the new child theme – rtl.css and style.css
These are stylesheet files that call back to the parent theme, and it is by editing these files that you can add your own cascading styles for altering the appearance of your site and much more.
If you need to change other files such as header.php and footer.php, then you need to copy the parent files into the folder which has been created on your WordPress server at /content/themes/
Make a note of exactly what your child theme folder has been named, then go down into the original themes folder.
Select the file you need to copy, eg footer.php in the example in the screenshot below, then select the “Copy” action at the top. In the destination path box, overtype the parent name with the child name and press Copy. The copied file will now appear in the list of available files in the theme editor, where you can begin your customisations.
There are other plugins available, some of which claim to offer file copying options during the child theme creation process, but none have ratings and are untested by myself. If you have had success with any of these or any questions, please leave a comment below.
There’s a bloody great helicopter Warship moored in the Thames at Greenwich!
When I surfaced at Greenwich on Thursday, there were two remarkable ships on view. The newly reburbished and reopened Cutty Sark is looking great now, with all the scaffolding and stuff gone, so you can see the glass building that surrounds the bottom half of the hull as it should be seen. With a slight lengthwise curve to the roof, the old ship has an impression of movement, more like she’s back sailing on the water than when it was just sunk in a darkened concrete hole of a dry dock.
Lynx helicopter
And out on the river Thames itself, before embarking the motor cruiser to see the Cable Car Crossing and the Thames Barrier, the scene is dominated by an enormous grey warship. From the waterside, the shape of HMS Ocean is disorientating. The superstructure is asymetrical, and the main hull looks like it’s been sliced lengthways, revealing two big holes at the side. Seeing the platform jutting out on the port side, it looks a bit like a traditional aircraft carrier, but it isn’t. It’s a helicopter ship, carrying eight Lynx helicopters there to patrol the no fly zone during the London 2012 Olympics.
HMS Ocean at Greenwich
According to information I looked up later, there are both Army and Navy Lynx helicopters onboard, as well as serving as a base for anti terrorist units during the period of the Games. Greenwich is used to seeing large Navy ships moored in the Thames, such as HMS Illustrious last year.
Queen Elizabeth 2nd, a photo by AndyRobertsPhotos on Flickr.
I must have been in a funny mood when I stopped to photograph this damp patch on the pavement just because the shape of it jumped out at me for looking a bit like the Queen’s head. It’s a phenomenon called “Pareidolia” which I’ve written about before in evidence-of-life-on-mars-and-figures-found-in-rocks Pareidolia is when a vague or random image is perceived as recognisable. The old ink blot phenomenon beloved of psychologists in old films and comedy. Maybe you can’t see the face at all? It’s not quite as obvious as the previous example, the face in the rock:
Seeing pictures of young Socialist Party supporters celebrating their Presidential Election victory in Paris at the Bastille, reminded me of the few occasions I visited the Bastille myself.
Paul Beuscher la librairie musicale de Paris
When I lived in Paris the only time I ever came out of the Metro at Bastille would have been to go to the big music shop, Paul Beuscher. It’s still there today, not covering quite so many shop fronts, and specialising more in pianos than guitars, but still there. The first time I went on the advice of somebody who had told me it was the best place to buy replacement guitar strings, because you could buy singles instead of having to buy a new set every time one broke. Breaking strings was an occupational hazard, we didn’t have portable amplifiers in those days, played purely acoustically, so there was a tendency in noisy corridors or streets to get maximum volume by hitting the strings hard. You know that if you go just a little bit too far a string will break, but every so often you get carried away and it happens. I was asked very recently why I don’t cut off the ends of the strings like most guitar players do when restringing, and it’s for that very reason. If a string breaks near the bridge, which is the most likely place, you can sometimes put the same string back on again, by retrieving the little nipple end that’s fallen inside the hollow guitar body, threading the end of the string through the ring, tying a knot in it and then tightening the string back up to playing tension again. But you can only do that if there is enough leftover string beyond the machine head to pull back through a couple of inches at least. If it works, then that’s great – you can carry on playing the same pitch without having to go away and find a replacement. Of course you could always carry a set of spares around all the time, but that would have required a certain organised resourceful lifestyle which just wasn’t possible in the 1970s! I had more than most, though, which meant that other guitarists often asked me if I could lend them a spare D string or more likely a top E in passing. I couldn’t afford to do that very often at all of course, otherwise it would have just been me all the time having to make the trek to Paul Beuscher’s music shop at Bastille to replenish everybody else’s supplies.
The Mazet Paris
One occasion was a more sever emergency than just a string break. I had a guitar stolen from underneath the pinball machine in the cafe Mazet. Having the means of earning a living suddenly disappear is quite a scary position to be in. As luck would have it, the music shop had a big sale on which included a bin full of broken guitars at next to nothing prices. After rummaging around I was able to find an Epiphone six string guitar that was only damaged by a large split on the side of the body. So it was perfectly playable and the sound quality seemed oddly unaffected by the broken wood too. A snip at 150 French francs, equivalent to about £15 then and maybe about £150 in today’s money. Musical instruments and most other thing were generally more expensive in France than in England, particularly so in Paris. Still are. Mid range guitars are probably quite a bit cheaper now than they were then, you could probably buy a playable guitar brand new and undamaged for the same amount, it wouldn’t be as good as my old Japanese built Epiphone though. A few years later Epiphone moved production of their guitars from Japan to Korea and the build quality suffered. Now they make cheap guitars in China, nothing to do with the original Epiphone. I kept and played that old broken Japanese Epiphone for many years afterwards, until the fixed bridge broke and I didn’t get around to having it fixed, what with the broken side as well. Then somebody persuaded me to sell it to them, which I should never have agreed to. Nearly all the guitars I’ve ever sold, I wish I still had. That’s life.
If you drink tea instead of coffee because the day is getting later and you don’t want coffee to keep you awake later when you go to bed, well did you know that a cup of tea contains about a half as much caffeine as a cup of instant coffee anyway? People who enjoy a nice cup of tea tend to carry on drinking several or many cups a day, so the total caffeine intake can become the equivalent to drinking two or three cups of coffee in the afternoon and evening, which is asking for trouble right?
I don’t drink beer and wine very often these days, and I’ve never enjoyed fizzy sugar drinks so I started drinking herbal teas decades ago of various sorts, and some are really good but only in small doses. Then I discovered the Rooibos or Redbush tea, branded as “11 O’Clock” or “Tick Tock” which is a caffeine free herb tea that actually tastes more like black tea than the green herb and fruit concoctions, and quite soon becomes an acquired taste that is actually more satisfying and thirst quenching than black tea, breakfast tea, indian tea, tea tea etc. So it’s good news that Rooibos is actually good for you with lots of antioxidants, and not in any way bad for the health.
Now rewind a decade or two and somewhere in East London I discovered Palanquin Spiced Tea. If you’ve ever ordered masala tea in an Indian restaurant you may be familiar with the idea of pungent spices boiled with tea, usually boiled with the milk and sugar too. Palanquin were the first to make it work as a tea bag, and not by any means as a pale imitation of the real thing. You can get other spicy teas, such as Celestial Seasons Bengal Spiced, and the range of Yogi teas but the balance is all lop sided to my taste, whereas Palanquin gets it right. The only problem was, well two problems – availability was patchy. You could find Palanquin spicy teas in East London supermarkets for a while, but you know how fickle they can be with local products (Palanquin is now made in Essex) and being based on a black tea, you can only drink so many cups a day without getting overcome with tannins and caffeine, especially of you let it brew for a bit too long, in which case it just gets stronger and stronger. But now Palanquin have started blending Rooibos or Red Bush tea as well as the standard black tea, and red bush doesn’t do that. You can leave the teabag in the cup for half an hour if you like and it doesn’t get that stewed taste at all, it just goes cold. And when you’ve drunk the tea you can pour more boiling water over it and it makes a perfectly acceptable second cuppa. Roibos is everywhere now and there’s really little or no reason to drink black tea anymore, well maybe after a Turkish meal or something in a little glass.
But now for everyday tea drinking you can get red bush spiced tea from Palanquin and that’s just about the ultimate perfection as far as I can taste, if you can find it. Or order online one day when the website ordering system is up and running properly.
Red Bush
Caffeine free
Palanquin Red Bush Tea, with its many positive health benefits is a great choice for health conscious people.
Red Bush
Cinnamon
Ginger
Cloves
Black Pepper
Cardamom
Andy Roberts is a writer who initiated DARnet. Contact me on aroberts@gmail.com or @aroberts on twitter
