Articles by Jodi Sweere

Jodi Sweere

Jodi Sweere

Working as a Research Scientist targeting Programmed Cell Death (apoptosis) in Feline T-cells, she finished a degree in Microbiology with minors in Chemistry and Philosophy. She worked in transfusion medicine and pyrophoric chemical production before leaving the sciences and returning to the arts with Web Design and Development projects at Wild-type.

Double Helix Inspiration

11 April 2010 in Credits by Jodi Sweere | No comments

Double helix stairs

Double helix stairs

Taken on Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay of California, this image titled “Double helix stairs” by photographer Jef Poskanser is composed of strong sun on a man-made  spiral access stairway paired with its natural shadow on the wall of a nondescript tank.

Our banner is a remix of this image found using the search term “double helix” over at Google Images. A second page search result yielded an image file named Double helix over at Wikimedia Commons.

Originally posted in a Flickr photostream on October 20, 2006, the file was  was transferred to Commons in the Category: Spiral stairs on March 25, 2008 and graciously released into the public domain through Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.

Here perhaps is visual evidence, that both man-made and natural elements can mimic each other.

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Rebuild in progress

9 April 2010 in Development Notes by Jodi Sweere | No comments

Spiral image

Spiral by Sven Geier

Our project took a back seat in 2009 and the site sat dormant for many months. Life gets in the way, as they say.

April brought us back to the table, with a previous WordPress (WP) reinstall overwriting the custom theme. So we begin again.

First, a bit of housekeeping.

WP was upgraded to the latest build v2.9.2. Four plugins were upgraded. The “WordPress Automatic Upgrade” plugin was removed, since an automatic upgrade function is built-in since WPv2.8 .

24 fictional Users created by bots and held in moderation for approval were deleted.

From there, the site theme had to be rebuilt entirely. The layout is a custom design based on the extensible  Tarski framework. The reinstall mentioned earlier wiped out the custom styles and page configurations with Tarskiv2.5.  With a new release, the theme was upgraded to v2.6 to begin the custom layout rebuild.

After searching many old CD’s from the months surrounding the original work back in August 2008, it became apparent that backup files for the final custom design were nonexistent.

Only the custom image files and screen shots could be found to work with. Fortunately, the custom work for the The Next Generation of Sitebuilding (TNG) installation we used to create the genealogy portion of the site remained intact, so some elements of the layout were easier to deduce from that part of the site, including dimensions, color scheme and typography.

The custom style sheet was rewritten from scratch. All posts and pages were missing and had to be recreated. Navigational links were rebuilt. Much left to do, but new beginnings aren’t always a bad thing.

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