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.

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

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.

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.

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.