Broadgate Ice Rink, near Liverpool Street Station London http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVQdl4EFLh0
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Broadgate Ice Rink near Liverpool Street Station London…
http://distributedresearch.net/status/broadgate-ice-rink-near-liverpool-street-station-london/
December 11 2011, 2:46am | Comments »
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I posted to youtube.com
Stratford Orbit Tower
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5hj-wDENOY&feature=youtube_gdata
- Tags:
- London
- Travel
- Stratford
- Orbit
- orbit tower
December 10 2011, 12:39pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Ghost London Cast Changes http ghostlondon com 98…
http://distributedresearch.net/status/ghost-london-cast-changes-http-ghostlondon-com-98/
Ghost London Cast Changes http://ghostlondon.com/98/ghost-london-cast-changes-for-2012/
December 8 2011, 1:56am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Theatre Breaks in London http theatrebreaks co 2941…
http://distributedresearch.net/status/theatre-breaks-in-london-http-theatrebreaks-co-2941/
Theatre Breaks in London http://theatrebreaks.co/2941/theatre-breaks-in-london/
November 27 2011, 3:22am | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
Deeds Not Words - Occupy London UBS
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/6358493247/
AndyRobertsPhotos
Occupy London UBS
November 18 2011, 9:48am | Comments »
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I posted to youtube.com
Occupy London UBS #OCCUPYLSX
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X8VMcPB-9g&feature=youtube_gdata
November 18 2011, 9:32am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
WordPress London #7
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/11/18/wordpress-london-7
I went to WordPress London meetup number #7 last night, hosted by Headshift at their office near Shad Thames, along the south bank of the Thames, east of Tower Bridge. Nice to have something on the East side for once, although south of the river, I wouldn’t normally mention the general location but for Londoners, having different travel options is essential and I was pleased to be able to exit the Transport For London system at a zone 2 tube station, Bermondsey. WordPress London is not really a mainly social gathering like some of the bloggers meetups, it’s a business learning event and last night there were three sections, each packed with fast moving presentations full of detail, actionable insights and deeply understood data. First up, a round up of news from the world of WordPress from Chris Adams of Headshift with a peek at the new drag and drop file upload interface for WordPress 3.3, out very soon. There was also a heads up for the ManageWP service launched this month, a service which I use myself and would also heartily recommend for anybody who maintains more than one self-hosted WordPress installation, in fact it’s brilliant if you have dozens or more. WordPress London Meetup Then David Bain delivered a comprehensive briefing about SEO for WordPress, including an outline of a hub and spoke structure for content based on using pages for the main parts of a site, supported by posts All based around keyword targeting, which, while possibly on it’s way to becoming somewhat old-school, is after all what search engine optimisation is all about. One or two plugin tips to be followed up there. Finally, Keith Devon a WordPress developer explained how and why to use WordPress Custom Post Types. Custom post types are not types of posts at all, but other types of content alongside of posts or pages. The example given was that of a real estate property rental site, for which the element “Property” needed to be a thing of itself, with it’s own display template in the theme, neither a post nor a page but with it’s own “add Property” section within the dashboard. This gave me some great ideas for how I might have designed one or two of my existing sites much better had the concept been around a few years ago. Keith showed us how to implement custom post types by dropping in chunks of code into functions.php “because it’s easier” but discussion from the audience suggests that using specialised plugins for the purpose may be the way to go if you want to be able to keep your site up to date with new software releases. Time for some brief discussions and an optional visit to a Samuel Smiths pub afterwards, so I walked back along the south bank and over London Bridge back to dry land. Hashtag: #WPLDN Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogWordPress London #7
- Tags:
- London
- bloggers
- wordpress
- London Bridge
- blog
- Travel
- software
- meetup
- London bloggers
- developer
- east
- business
- blogger
- Bermondsey
- Custom
- Headshift
- hub
- Keith Devon
- ManageWP
- Samuel Smiths
- SEO
- shad thames
- tower bridge
- wpldn
November 18 2011, 2:31am | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
But What Are The Alternatives? - Occupy London - Finsbury Square - Real Democracy Now
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/6336699643/
AndyRobertsPhotos
But What Are The Alternatives?
Google Money Masters
Money as debt
Occupy London - Finsbury Square - Real Democracy Now
November 12 2011, 8:28am | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
Yurt - Occupy London - Finsbury Square - Real Democracy Now
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/6336696887/
AndyRobertsPhotos
Yurt - Occupy London - Finsbury Square - Real Democracy Now
November 12 2011, 8:27am | Comments »
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I posted to wordr.org
The People’s Plaques of Islington
Two weeks ago we visited the Islington Local History Centre, part of Islington Library, and underneath which you’ll find Islington Museum (@IslingtonMueum). Yes it’s all about Islington in this post – and Islingtonians! – because Islington Council in London runs a People’s Plaques scheme in which the public can nominate and vote for plaques to be erected in the borough. We thought this warranted a closer look… The People’s Plaques initiative was started in 2009 with the first plaques being erected in 2010. Local people and events commemorated so far include Mary Wollstonecraft, The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, and Kenneth Williams. But the council has been putting up (green) plaques for longer than that – George Orwell’s being a famous one – and also lists their own and other plaques within the borough on this A-Z of Islington plaques page. They’re also helping us update our list of plaques erected by Islington Council.
Listen to the audio below for our interview with heritage services manager Cheryl Smith and heritage assistant Ben Smith. We chatted about how the People’s Plaques scheme was born, how their plaque criteria differ from English Heritage’s, the possibility of reusing their data at a History Hackday, plaque design and manufacture, what’s coming up with the next public vote, and more besides… [Note: the web streaming sound levels are rather low, so I'd recommend listening with headphones or via a connection to external speakers]
The Local History Centre and it’s team provide a lot more than plaques: they host and curate the local history archives including a large pool of historic images, maps, census records, and electoral roles. In turn they house several special collections for Islington notables of yore, such as artist Walter Sickert and playwright Joe Orton. They also have a great blog for Sadlers Wells Archive – ballet fans take note! If that wasn’t enough they also host exhibitions and events, list local walking and cycling tours links, and much more. They’re part of Islington Heritage Services which also runs the Islington Museum located downstairs and we had a good chat with the museum’s Alex Smith afterwards. Looking at their site I found that the first mention of Islington can be traced back to an early Anglo-Saxon charter and it was originally named Giseldone, then Gislandune. According to their short history of Islington: “The name means ‘Gisla’s hill’ from an old Saxon personal name Gisla and dun meaning ‘hill’. According to one early writer, it was a savage place, a forest “full of the lairs of wild beasts”, where bears and wild bulls roamed. On the edges of the forest was a pasture for hogs. In The Domesday Book of 1086 the name had mutated to Isendone, and then Iseldone, which remained in use until the 17th century when it was replaced by the modern form.” I could go on but you can find out more by exploring from their Heritage Services webpage.
The blue plaques idea was first conceived of by Liberal MP William Ewart, who went on to co-found the scheme with the RSA in 1866. Another thing Ewart is renowned for is his pioneering advocacy of free public libraries, the formation of which he helped pass into law in 1850. It’s apt then that our first meeting with council staff to find out about plaques was in a library, when the history of both plaques and public libraries is so intimately connected. Three final notes for the diary: public nominations for the 2012 People’s Plaques vote open in December 2011 (anyone can nominate and vote – last year they had nominations from as far away as New Zealand!), and two further plaques voted in by the public in 2010 will be put up in 2012 – for Suffragettes martial arts instructor Edith Garrud and Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy author Douglas Adams. We’ll keep you posted on both here and via Twitter. – [photos: George Orwell plaque CC licensed courtesy of trailerfullofpix on Flickr, and Mary Wollstonecraft kindly donated by Islington Heritage Services]
- Tags:
- London
- Islington
- News
- Douglas Adams
- Project information
- h2g2
- Edith Garrud
- George Orwell
- green plaques
- Islington Council
- Islington Museum
- library
- Mary Wollstonecraft
- Peoples Plaques
November 2 2011, 10:16am | Comments »
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I posted to wordr.org
Plaque to the future: the ebook edition
http://blog.openplaques.org/2011/10/plaque-to-the-future-the-ebook-edition/
Much as we hope Open Plaques will support and expand public exploration of our surroundings past and present, we didn’t imagine a selection of our community’s content gracing an ebook in the Kindle store quite yet. Our mistake clearly, as that’s exactly what’s happened in photographic terms… Early last month (5th September 2011 to be precise), Simon Harriyott of our team received a message via Flickr about usage of some of our photographs in a forthcoming ebook. The prospect seemed intriguing, and it’s since turned out to be even more complementary to our aims than we’d initially guessed. It seems that almost without realising, we’ve managed to gather together through our user-contributed service a collection of photographs that helps overcome the usual limits of publishing. The ebook in question – London’s Blue Plaques In A Nutshell - features some 1029 illustrated plaques, 259 photographs of which come from those displayed on the Open Plaques website. Each reproduction is also clearly accredited to its individual creator, in line with the attribution license that photos need to have to be included in our service. A book is of its time – that’s half its strength and attraction, and central to how we value both the artifact’s meaning and the author’s perspective. But it’s equally true that as our physical landscape changes – and the amount of historical plaques constantly shifts with both losses and gains – something like a “blue plaques guide” is hard to keep current for more than a matter of weeks. Add to that the sheer mass of plaques to be captured (we currently have 1,625 listed in London) and in this scenario the digital, community-driven collection comes up trumps. The Contents area of the ebook divides the plaques up into 21 categories, framed by what the person commemorated is most notable for (the nearest equivalent on the Open Plaques site being ‘roles‘). Most are quite precise such as literature, science, theatre, music and politics; the notable exception is ‘overseas visitors’ (this category has some 53 entries, including Mark Twain, Emile Zola, Karl Marx and Napoleon). Of course the ebook also allows you to navigate freely between plaques, with the categories acting as a useful but optional pathway. “A native of Scotland, Boswell, was forced to spend a lot of his time in Edinburgh practising Law with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. Long known only as the friend and biographer of Samuel Johnson the recent publication of Boswell’s journals revealed one of the world’s greatest diarists. Boswell was gregarious, high-spirited, sensual, attractive to women and he found in London the combination of gross and refined pleasures that he needed.” The Open Plaques team is delighted to help facilitate a project produced by someone who has real form in uncovering and curating London’s past and is also a veteran of the digital space. After obtaining at PhD in physical chemistry, author Bill McCann researched and lectured at Imperial College London, before joining the Museum of London where he worked as an archaeologist and managed a geophysical laboratory. Whilst there, McCann made an interesting intervention in the debate around the likely architectural accuracy of the replica Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre three years after it opened in 1996. From from 2000 to early 2011 he also ran StoryOfLondon in his spare time – a website that explored “the odd and unusual” history of the capital. Snapshots of this can still be viewed in the WayBackMachine part of the Internet Archive project, but the site is due to be revived shortly. Bill has always been interested in language, and moved to China as a TEFL teacher in January 2006. He has now settled in Suzhou, and has developed a keen interest in Chinese dialects, particularly those of Wu group, of which Suzhouhua is the premier dialect. He is currently the Associate Editor for China on the International Dialects of English Archive. The preface of the ebook also adds this illuminating detail: “The origins of this book go back to 2004 when I worked with Robbie Stamp and Stuart Williamson on a project that would have delivered short stories from history directly to people’s mobile phones. At that time I wrote a single aphorism for each of the Blue Plaques in Central London and these, together with short biographies of selected individuals, were to be recorded and made available to anyone dialling a special number on his or her phone. A number were indeed recorded by Stephen Fry and Joanna Lumley, but alas, the project was ahead of its time, and the necessary start-up financial backing proved elusive.” There’s a parallel of sorts with another project then engrossing one of McCann’s partners. Robbie Stamp who had co-founded the collaborative online encyclopedia h2g2 with Douglas Adams, was at that time also executive producing the film of Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy, released in 2005, a project that itself had struggled for several years through many incarnations and funding hurdles before coming to fruition. The trio of McCann, Stamp and Williamson were were ahead of their time with their portable history project. Seven years on, we’ve finally squared the circle: ebooks and the evolution of the web more broadly has caught up with their vision. Mindful too of the time constraints imposed upon busy urbanites and any rushed visitor to the capital, the textual content attached to each each plaque entry has retained the aphoristic brevity first planned by McCann in 2004. “The 1st woman to sit in the House of Commons, Nancy Astor’s sharp and acid wit was more than a match for her male colleagues, including Winston Churchill. She was led into the House of Commons by Arthur Balfour and Lloyd-George, both of whom had said that they would rather have a rattlesnake in the House than her. Mr Speaker advised her against wearing hats in the House; changes in fashion would excite idle comment. Ignoring him, she wore a toque on her first day.” The rabbit hole with any plaque and its underlying story – should you chose to select it – is yours to plunge down, via the Wikipedia links on the Open Plaques website and in many other places. But as a starting point for Kindle users to explore and discover six centuries of London encapsulated in plaques, this looks like a great primer. If you happen to get this ebook, we’d be very interested to hear your thoughts on it. [Extracts from James Bowell and Nancy Astor plaques copyright of the author Bill McCann]
October 26 2011, 1:32pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Kew Gardens
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/10/11/kew-gardens
There are many folly buildings at Kew Gardens and yesterday I learned that the person who instigated them had a swivel chair installed inside the little domed colonade at the top of the hill near the lake next to the Palm House. From that vantage point she could survey the results of the gardeners’ labour. The view would have been much different in those days but I thought I’d make a mock swivel chair video of the view from yesterday at Kew Gardens.
Many more Kew Gardens photos are amongst my photosets on Flickr such as : Kew Gardens October 2011 Kew Gardens Collection of Kew Gardens Photosets Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogKew Gardens
- Tags:
- London
- video
- garden
- photo
- kew
- Kew gardens
- flickr
- colonade
- folly
- palm house
- photosets
- swivel chair
October 11 2011, 9:04am | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
The Orbit Tower London Stratford
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/6227532817/
AndyRobertsPhotos
The Orbit Tower London Stratford
October 9 2011, 4:44pm | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
The Orbit Tower London Stratford
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/6228041320/
AndyRobertsPhotos
The Orbit Tower London Stratford
October 9 2011, 4:41pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
London Bloggers – Heather Cowper
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/09/02/london-bloggers-%E2%80%93-heather-cowper
London Bloggers Meetup last night featured a talk by Heather Cowper from Heather and Her Travels about travel blogging in general, and in particular How travel bloggers make money from their blogs.
An interesting and thorough presentation, but the thing that intrigued me was the makeup of the attendees at this long established London Bloggers meetup. Very few reconisable faces amongst the eighty odd people there at The Long Acre, and if you got the chance to talk to anybody, for the most part they turned out not to be bloggers at all but people from corporate marketing departments and even one so called “blogging consultant” who doesn’t blog and never did! Have the real bloggers left the building, content to post their valuable unique content into Facebook Twitter and Google Plus (or just reshare others) or is it just because it’s August, the silly season?
Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogLondon Bloggers – Heather Cowper
- Tags:
- London
- bloggers
- marketing
- blog
- London bloggers
- presentation
- blogging
- blogger
- blogs
- bloggers make money
- cowper
- heather
- Heather Cowper
- silly season
September 2 2011, 4:53pm | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
London Bloggers
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/6103208335/
AndyRobertsPhotos
London Bloggers
September 1 2011, 12:15pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
London Bloggers – Heather Cowper
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/08/24/london-bloggers-heather-cowper
London Bloggers Meetup last night featured a talk by Heather Cowper from Heather and Her Travels about travel blogging in general, and in particular How travel bloggers make money from their blogs.An interesting and thorough presentation, but the thing that intrigued me was the makeup of the attendees at this long established London Bloggers meetup. Very few reconisable faces amongst the eighty odd people there at The Long Acre, and if you got the chance to talk to anybody, for the most part they turned out not to be bloggers at all but people from corporate marketing departments and even one so called “blogging consultant” who doesn’t blog and never did!Have the real bloggers left the building, content to post their valuable unique content into Facebook Twitter and Google Plus (or just reshare others) or is it just because it’s August, the silly season? Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogLondon Bloggers – Heather CowperRelated posts:London BloggersLondon Bloggers new venue, competition and pubsLondon Bloggers presentations
- Tags:
- London
- bloggers
- marketing
- blog
- London bloggers
- presentation
- blogging
- blogger
- blogs
- bloggers make money
- cowper
- heather
- Heather Cowper
- silly season
August 24 2011, 4:52am | Comments »
