Gary Gale

On the way through South Kensington Tube station this morning, I spied a new Underground map. That's nothing new, the Underground map seems to be changing frequently these days. But this map was very noticeably different.

There was no Victoria or Jubilee lines at all. The Piccadilly line terminated at Hammersmith and Finsbury Park and had stations that have been closed for years; Brompton Road, Down Street and York Road. The Central Line stopped at Liverpool Street.

A standard WordPress install is incredibly powerful and flexible. For a lot of people, WordPress out of the box plus one of the stock WordPress themes is enough. But the possibilities for customization are endless; you can add plugins and other themes. Sometimes these do just what you want. Sometimes you need to ... tweak WordPress.

A very high proportion of the customization advice you'll find on the web starts with these lines ... add the following to the end of your theme's functions.php or even worse, advises that you modify the source code of your theme or your plugins. This is bad for many reasons:

• Editing your theme's functions.php makes theme specific customizations; change your theme and your customizations will no longer get loaded.
• When your theme and plugins get updated you'll find all your careful hand crafted customizations get overwritten and lost.
• A lot of theme and plugin authors won't offer support for changes you might have made to the source code.
• Your customizations might work; but you might also inadvertently make some other changes which will stop things working.

WordPress doesn't yet support a way for site specific customizations to be made and loaded without touching theme, plugin or core files; that's why I wrote WP Customizer and that's what this plugin is for. When WordPress does support such a way, this plugin will thankfully be obsolete.

Some uses of maps have remained relatively unchanged through the ages. We still use them to find out where we are and how to get somewhere else. Governments still use them to say "this is mine, that is yours". But as our planet has now been pretty comprehensively mapped, we don't use them to say "I got here first" that much anymore.

Which makes maps that prove that someone really did get there first extremely coveted and extremely valuable in about equal measures. The combination of value, national pride and good old human greed also makes early maps a fertile breeding ground for trickery and fakery.

The discovery of the fourth continent, after Europe, Asia and Africa, seems to have had more than its fair share of controversy.

Popular opinion holds that Cristoforo Columbo, better known as the anglicised Christopher Columbus, got to America first in 1492. Of course first is a loaded term; Columbus may have been the first European to set foot in the Americas but he certainly wasn't the first human on the continent. But did Columbus get there first?

Probably not; there's now growing evidence that a Norse expedition, led by Leif Ericson, landed on what is now Newfoundland in the 11th Century after being blown off course by a storm when travelling from Norway to Greenland. According to the Book of Icelanders, compiled around 1122 by Ari The Wise, Ericson first landed on a rocky and desolute place he named Helluland or Flat Rock Land, which may have been Baffin Island and then sailed for a further two days before landing again in a place he named Vinland, often mistranslated literally as Wineland but more likely to mean Land with Great Grass Fields.

Of course it would help if there was a map of Vinland, to underscore the I got there first point.