Edinburgh Photo Tour
Having created a slide show tour of Glasgow on YouTube, I obviously had to do one for Edinburgh as well, partly to show a lack of bias between the two rival cities, partly because it is Scotland's capital city and partly because I got to know the place quite well during 15 years of working there (commuting daily from Glasgow along the 45 longest miles in Scotland). A colleague (also from the west) once described me as one of the few Glaswegians he knew who actually liked working in Edinburgh... So here's my assorted selection of photographs of "Auld Reekie" in YouTube - Edinburgh Photo Tour.
Glasgow Photo Tour
The Glasgow Photo Tour on YouTube has proved to be popular but I got feedback which suggested that not enough time had been allocated to each slide to allow some viewers a proper look at the pictures. So I created an updated version - same pictures but setting the viewing time for each a couple of seconds longer. Overall run time is increased by less than three minutes. If it's still too short for some of the slides, you can always click the "pause" control. The updated Glasgow slide show is at YouTube - Glasgow Photo Tour.
Flowers of Scotland "Flipbooks"
In the days before the huge growth of YouTube and the much faster speeds of data communication provided by broadband, I used to create "slide shows" using Javscript which would run through a selection of graphics on a single Web page. While browsing through the Rampant Scotland site recently I came across them again and was surprised at how many of these pages had been created (23 in all) showing a selection of flowers at a wide variety of locations including Abbotsford (Sir Walter Scott's house near Melrose), Branklyn Gardens (A famous National Trust for Scotland garden in Perth), Glenarn (A private house in Rhu, Argyllshire), Linn Botanic Gardens (on Rosneath Peninsula) and St Andrews Botanic Garden (a hidden gem in the university town). The graphics are on the small side compared to today's slide shows (especially when viewed full screen). But knowing how popular flower pictures from Scotland are with readers, I thought it worth pointing to this part of the site. If you place the mouse pointer over the images, the name of each flower will appear on the status line at the foot of your browser window. See Flowers of Scotland "Flipbooks".
Scottish Place Names in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Ian Kendall, who is based these days in Melbourne, has written about the place names in many towns and cities around the world which have a Scottish connection. The place names connected with Scotland in 43 towns and cities are now fully documented, ranging from Adelaide and Sydney in Australia to Winnipeg and Calgary in Canada and covering locations such as Houston and Pittsburgh in the USA as well as places in South Africa and New Zealand. Of course, new data is always being uncovered and he has now updated the page on his home town of Melbourne. Of the names of the 543 suburbs, neighbourhoods and municipalities in Metropolitan Melbourne, 138 (25.4%) can be found in Scotland, or are based on Scottish family names, Scottish titles or Scottish words. Of course, some of the names are used in other parts of the British Isles as well, but at least 84 of them (15.5%) appear to have a uniquely Scottish connection or are readily identifiable with places in Scotland that are based on the same names. For the Melbourne page, see Scottish Place Names in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia and for the overall index leading to the other 42 towns and cities, see Scottish Place Names Around the World - Index
Yours aye
Scottie
Previous editions of this Newsletter are available in an Archive. The Index to the other pages of the Rampant Scotland site is available here.
To receive a text version of this newsletter as a reminder to look at these Web pages when they are published, just send an e-mail to Scottie@RampantScotland.com with "Subscribe Newsletter" in the subject line.
