“Ora na azu nwa,” translated from the Nigerian Igbo, means, “it takes the community/village to raise a child.” Websites are not unlike this proverb and most likely, any technical project would fall, quite nicely, under this very wise and encompassing statement. Having a single name attached to a project can give the impression of an individual effort, nothing could be further from the truth. Many have contributed to this project, too many to name and many, whose names I will never know.
A creative career is filled with mentoring, admonishments, stupendous failures and ecstatic successes. The nature of creativity is to make something that moments ago was not there, this is the thrill. But in reality it is a series of choices about what is in and what is not in the final presentation. The audience is rarely interested in the process that led to those conclusions, only the presentation itself. As they should be, for that is their collaborative role in a process where one makes and another experiences what has been made.
A colophon is for those fellow creators who have a perverse curiosity in how a thing has come to be. What corners were cut and what shoulders were stood on. They are not just interested in the how but the what, the tools and the technology. It also never hurts to credit those individuals who had an immediate contributory effect on the outcome. To be fair, although they have done everything they can to steer me on a true and honest course, I am the captain of my own ship and subject to bringing my ship successfully into port of or to run aground.
When I first met my friend Michael McCarthy, MD, he was a practicing doctor and I was an experimental digital composer. Many years and coffee shops later he is a respected science and medical journalist and I am listening to his advice on how to be a better writer. He was an independent for many years, North American Editor for The Lancet and now runs his own shop at Seattle/LocalHealthGuide.
My full and grateful thanks goes out to WordPress and the outstanding community that surounds the technology platform, it is impossible to separate one from the other. WholeThinking was begun in version 3.0.1 and opened im version 3.0.4. WholeThinking is a heavily modified Canvas 3.0 theme from Woo themes.
The fonts in WholeThinking are served from the subscription service, typekit, using the CSS property @font-face. I have found the service to be a good value and of high performance. WholeThinking is currently using the fonts: Myriad Pro, Minion Pro, Adobe Text Pro and Cronos.
Illustrations and Images
All illustrations and images found on the WholeThinking essay portal are original productions, unless otherwise indicated. They are created by the author, Garrett Cobarr, in one of several methods:
- • Photos are captured on a Canon EOS 50D digital SLR and manipulated in Adobe Photoshop.
- • 3D Images & animations are created in Maxon’s Cinema 4D Studio.
- • Compositional constructs and effects composed and painted in Adobe Photoshop.
- • Vector graphics are created in Adobe Illustrator or InDesign, rasterized in Photoshop.
- • Some post graphical effects are created in Adobe After Effects.
- • When available, downloadable PDFs were created in Adobe InDesign or Acrobat.
Site Plugins & Widgets
Akismet: The preeminent spam control service.
All in One SEO Pack: Search Engine Optimization, its a black art, All In One makes it tolerable.
Fast Secure Contact Form: I cannot say enough about this plugin. Excellent detailed control over the fields you want and what they collect. Multiple forms with backup in case you lose a current design, just recover it. Detailed CSS styling control located conveniently within the interface. Some of the best documentation and tutorials I have seen for any plugin.
Fluency Admin: A WordPress admin with better clarity and organization.
Google Analytics for WordPress: Adds a number of features to Google Analytics tracking.
Google XML Sitemaps: The other, very important half of being visible to Google and other search engines, think SEO is enough? Guess again.
Sociable for WordPress 3.0: This plugin handles all the post sharing with other services. Create your own icons, I did, or use their many choices in 3 sizes. You will learn about social networks you have never heard of before.
Social Media Widget: A sidebar widget to allow your users to view/follow your other ponifications, Twitter, Facebook, RSS, etc.
Ultimate tag cloud widget: Great control over visual styling of your tag cloud and no need for Flash.
WP Security Scan: A bundle of useful information to keep your site from the dark side.