One of the main troubles with this, is that our ground water supply is usually above the gas deposit and the fracturing can cause the gas (and the chemicals and toxins in the pumping fluid) to be mixed with the ground water, thereby contaminating our drinking water.

Do not think that this is an American problem, our ‘Aussie’ politicians are just as mindless when it come to the all-consuming-dollar.

I would highly recommend that everyone watch this movie, it is an eye-opener along the lines of Michael Moore. Admittedly the movie maker ‘Josh Fox’ is much better at playing the banjo than he is at focusing the camera.

In the image above, the water spraying towards the sunshine is FULL of Poisonous Chemicals and Neurotoxins. About 30% to 40% of the water that is pumped underground returns to the well and is placed into “a flow-back pit”. This is either trucked away to be disposed of, or the oil companies save some of their hard earned cash, and let the sunshine evaporate it for them – often with the help of pumps to spay the water into the air so it evaporates quicker (see image below). Of course this is a great way of dispersing the toxic chemicals and volatile organics into OUR air.

If your word ain’t no good, you’re no good.
Quote from the Gaslands movie, regarding the politicians.

No Fracking sign

By God, if your way of life is being beseiged and your health is under attack, I don’t know what else you can do! I don’t know where the hell I can go though, where else can I go, this is happening everywhere!
Quote from the Gaslands movie, cattle farmer regarding his home and farm.

Evaporation ponds of fracking fluids

Parchment Paper

First of all, find the image you want to use as the background in your web page. For this example I am using a ‘parchment’ paper that I pulled off the web.

As you can see this has quite a dark surround that would likely be quiet ugly as a tiled background. I’m really using this image to show you how easy it is to get rid of the unwanted aspects in your image.

In Photoshop, go to Filter –> Other –> Offset.
As you can see in the next screen shot, I have set the Horizontal and Vertical offset to about half the size of the image.

On the Horizontal plane, this has the effect of moving the image off the screen to one side and sliding that missing section back from the opposite side. If this sounds confusing, check out the image for clarification.

Parchment, Filter--> Other--> Offset

The next four images give you an idea of what the offset filter does, as the value is increased the images begins to move to the right. As it move the section of the image that is scrolled off the right side margin reappears on the left side of the image.

Offset 1 - No Offset Applied Yet

Offset 2 - Image Is Starting To Wrap To The Right

Offset 3 - Wrapper Further To The Right

Offset 4 - You Could Tile This!

The next stage is to use the clone brush to remove the join that is running through the middle of our new image – previously this was the outer edges of the image.
So grab the Clone Brush (looks like a rubber stamp) ‘ALT+CLICK’ the source area (where you want to copy from) and then start to paint over the areas in the middle that would not work as a tiled image.

Be careful around the edges, this is what will give you the ‘seamless’ tiling, so if you start to clone over the edges, you will loose your seamless effect.

Parchment Tile Half Done

Parchment Tile Completed

Add this image to your body declaration in your web page…

body {
background:url(folder-name/tiled-image-name.jpg);
}

…and here is what it looks like when tiled.

The Completed Tiled Parchment

This images still needs a bit of work if I wanted to use it, there is a vertical patter of darker dots repeating at regular intervals that clearly and loudly states “I AM A TILED IMAGE”. A little work with the clone brush would quickly fix this problem.

This tutorial does give you the basics on how to create a tiled background for your wbe page, The rest is up to you…

• How BIG is your imagination…
• Clearly thinking about the purpose that your tiled background will be used for…
• Reducing the opacity…
• Etc. etc.

The ‘sellers’ of these products are BIG companies with a HUGE marketing budget, they like to tell us that they are an indispensable item.
Money greases many palms from store buyers to politicians in order that we many ‘have’ the convenience of these bags.

Little is every said or shown of the ‘island’ of plastic floating on our oceans, or the toxic chemicals that plastic bags Leach into every part of the environment.

It really is easy to take your own bags to the supermarket to purchase your groceries, all it takes is a little bit of forethought on your part to remember to take your bags. For the sake of future generations, lets put a stop to this ludicrous ‘plastic’ practice and practice some responsibility for the environment.

Did you know that Australian’s throw 429,000 bags into landfill every hour! Americans throw away twice that much EVERY MINUTE!

3.92 billion (3,920,000,000) new plastic shopping bags are used in Australia every year! – if tied together they would circle the earth 24 times.

Here are a couple of factsheets from Clean Up Australia “Saying No to Plastic Bags”.

Here’s a GREAT video regarding banning single use plastic bags.

You can easily modify this so it shows the ‘slug’ of your posts and pages.

Click on ‘permalinks’ in the left side column (under Settings) and insert this text into the ‘customer structure’ text box.

/%category%/%postname%/

Your URLs will look much nicer to the eye, and are now readable and remember-able by your sites visitors.

An extra Caveat Emptor here… (buyer beware)…

The usual setup for a blog is to make alterations to your blog on the server, and to keep a backup of your MySQL database incase the unexpected happens.
I needed to download my database from the server and to run through the necessary actions to get a copy running on my ‘local’ machine.
After the backup to my ‘local’ machine, I could view the home page, but all other pages came up with the error “this page does not exist…”.
Just as a thought I reset the permalinks to the ‘default’ and all my pages miraculously returned. I placed the /%category%/%postname%/ back into the ‘custom structure box, and my pages stayed there.
I have no idea why this was so, but is something to be aware of in case you have the same error type.

Here is the code to do so…

function my_stylesheet($content) {
  global $wp_query;
  if (is_page()) {
    $pageID = $wp_query->post->ID;
    if ($pageID == '222') {
        $content = "\t";
        $content .= "<link rel=\"stylesheet\" type=\"text/css\" href=\"";
        $content .= get_bloginfo('stylesheet_directory') . "/alternate.css";
        $content .= "\" />";
        $content .= "\n\n";
        }
    }
    return $content;
}
add_filter ('thematic_create_stylesheet', 'my_stylesheet')

This code goes in your ‘functions.php’ page that is within your child theme.
If you do not have a ‘functions.php’ page, simply make one up using a blank document, insert the function above, save it as ‘function.php’.
This should be in the same directory as your ‘style.css’.

In the function, change the pageID == '222' to the number of the page you want to have an alternative style sheet for. Don’t forget to make the ‘alternative.css’ style sheet, with your modified CSS.

To load a custom CSS stylesheet on multiple pages:

function my_stylesheet($content) {
  global $wp_query;
  if (is_page()) {
    $pageID = $wp_query->post->ID;
    $pagelist = array('222','333','444');
    if (in_array($pageID, $pagelist)) {
        $content = "\t";
        $content .= "<link rel=\"stylesheet\" type=\"text/css\" href=\"";
        $content .= get_bloginfo('stylesheet_directory') . "/alternate.css";
        $content .= "\" />";
        $content .= "\n\n";
        }
    }
    return $content;
}
add_filter ('thematic_create_stylesheet', 'my_stylesheet');