Genealogy of Life · 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.

WordPress was upgraded to the latest version 3.3.

Installed the InfoLinks plugin but need to further customize placement of tag clouds.

Began working on importing gedcoms to a new Tree in order to update the species to current Catalogue of Life data set, but those were composed with names in the First Name field, rather than the Surname field so they don’t sort properly. The new gedcoms reassigned ID# resulting in broken media links.

Will halt work until further consultation and problem resolution with Paul Pruitt on how we will proceed.

The Kingdom Animalia is so huge that it is impossible to import the whole of it in a .ged file. The solution is to break it down into smaller parts and import. All 36 Phylums have been entered, but only the first four have been completed beyond the level of Class.

Classes in phylum, Chordata, Cnidaria and Ctenophora were manually entered today.

WordPress was upgraded to version 3.2.1.

A Tarski theme upgrade was available, so the current custom Tarski v 2.6 was upgraded to v 3.1.2 and a child theme called “Genealogy of Life” was created.

TNG was upgraded from v 8.10 to v 8.13.

In TNG, work has begun to customize the Surnames titles by conversion to Species titles, in order to better represent the purpose of the database. More on title customizations will be described in a future post.

WordPress has been upgraded to the latest version, along with it’s plugins.

TNG has been upgraded from version 7.1 to the current 8.10 version. Yay.

In the most recent TNG version 8.1.0, a lot of changes have been made. Core files and directories have been moved around and additional elements have been added to some pages. The Surnames page has been revamped, so it’ll need to be customized to suit the needs of this site.

Previously not assigned Mammillaria nodifera has now been renamed and assigned as Prionitis nodifera per January 3rd, 2011 ITIS database. The other unassigned marine red algae in the Mammillaria genus will subsequently be explored and correctly assigned.

Phylum Magnoliophyta has been expanded to include Class names. All Orders for those Classes have been entered.

For Order Asparagales, Family names are complete. In the Family Amaryllidaceae a;; Genus names are now entered in the database.

The Genus Rhodophiala has been completed with the addition of all Species.

Reakirt's Blue

So many species…so little time.

More entries have been added to Phylum Arthropoda. All Class names have been entered. Within Class Insecta, all Order names have been entered.

Within Order Lepidoptera, Superfamily names are complete.

Within Superfamily Papilionoidea, Family Lycaenidae has been completed through Genus names beginning with “F”.

Within Family Lycaenidae, Genus Echinargus is complete with all Species names.

Of course there’s a method to the madness. I wanted to add a photo I took last July of a pretty little “Blue” butterfly that posed for me so nicely in the neighborhood I was living in at the time just above the northeast shore of Lake Worth, Texas.

In order to add the image, I had to add Echinargus isola to the database. I’m hoping my photography will motivate me to complete more work here on the database as time goes on.

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.

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.

Articles by Jodi Sweere

Site Upgrades

Building Phylums

Site Upgrades

Site Upgrades

Marine Red Algae

Building the Plant Kingdom

Building the Animal Kingdom

Double Helix Inspiration

Rebuild in progress

Discussion

Hybrid Discussion

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