I’m Mike Kupietz. You can be forgiven for not knowing who I am. I do have to admit I thought I’d make more of a splash.

Mostly all the images on this site are my own art. There are a few public domain images on this site. As of this writing the images I didn’t create are:
– the poo emoji on the BS Detector post
– Cezanne’s “House with Red Roof”, which I used a detail of on the cover of “Five Themes In Uncertain Times” as a symbolic representation that I’ll try to get around to explaining if I ever get that album finished and released
– The ornate “K” stamp logo (in the background of the header and used as a default featured image for posts without a custom one), which is a logo I’ve used for many years, from an actual rubber stamp that I bought in the stamp store in Northgate Mall in Seattle in probably 1995. It’s originally from the decorative typeface “Cloister Initials” created in 1918 by renowned typographer Frederic W. Goudy, and nowadays available online as LTC Goudy Initials, which is used for the ostentatious drop caps at the beginning of each post page of the site. (Goudy was also the designer of the dreadfully overused Copperplate Gothic, which will be familiar to anyone who was anywhere in the 1990s.)
– Also, when reviewing equipment or apps, I may include a screenshot or image from the author’s site, as I did with my post about the Bento Box synthesizer… I hope this is alright.
– This list may not be exhaustive. There may be others here and there as I work on the site.

All other images are by me. As of this writing, AI generative art has been a recent fascination, so many of the images were created that way, but a few older ones, particularly album covers of older pieces and recordings, are my own photography, photoshop manipulations, or done in iOS apps such as Sketch Club, Art Set, or Snapseed. For a while I was doing a lot of abstracts in Sketch Club and then punching them up using Google’s original Deep Dream AI image enhancer.

All mine. Except, where music is clearly marked as cover songs, in which case it’s my original arrangement of somebody else’s music.

This site runs on WordPress and is built on my own heavy-duty code customizations to the free Sinatra theme. If you click that link and hit the “preview” button to look at their demo, anything you see on this site’s design that isn’t in their demo, I wrote myself in PHP. It was not fun, I can tell you that. I hate PHP.

But, I’m a code cowboy, and distrusting of other software developers, so anything not super-complicated, I’d prefer to code myself than use a plugin for.

No such luck. What I did was take the free version of the Hierarchical HTML Sitemap plugin and customize the PHP code of it almost beyond recognition to get it to generate usable menus in the way I wanted. On my list of things to do is a post showing the customized plugin code that creates the menus.

I was very gratified when someone complimented my display font on this site, because I attacked choosing that font with brutal, neurotic, perfectionistic determination. When I first had the idea of this site, I knew what I wanted the “KUPIETZ|ARTS+CODE” to look like, right down to the font, and I spent a long time going through Google Fonts trying to find it. Ultimately I couldn’t find an exact match to what I had in my head, but the web font Red Hat Display came closest.

Smaller headings and body text are my old standby Open Sans, which is probably my favorite body typeface of all time, possibly excepting whatever they used in that ’80s paperback edition of “Dream Park” by Larry Niven, which I’ve never been able to find a digital recreation of. (Yes, design geeks, Sunset Serial Regular is very similar. I know that. You think I don’t know that?)

Here’s an auto-generated PHP dump of plugins which are active right now. Some of them might not be in use on the site even though they’re active. A few have been blocked from appearing in this list so as not to give away my site security measures.

• Query Monitor - The developer tools panel for WordPress.
• Age Gate - A customisable age gate to block content from younger people
• Auto Upload Images - Automatically upload and import external images of a post to Wordpress upload directory and media management
• Better Search Replace - A small plugin for running a search/replace on your WordPress database.
• BugFu Console Debugger - Log/Debug the PHP code in your Theme/Plugin with your Browser Console *no extension needed*
• CatFolders Lite - WP Media Folders - Organize and manage your files with WordPress media library folders. Unlimitedly fast, flexible, and professional.
• Child Themes Helper - Tool to aid the child theme developer. Copies files from the parent theme to the child theme, duplicating the folder structure in the child theme. Directly edit the child theme's files. Create a new child theme from any template theme.
• Classic Editor - Enables the WordPress classic editor and the old-style Edit Post screen with TinyMCE, Meta Boxes, etc. Supports the older plugins that extend this screen.
• Custom Taxonomy Order - Allows for the ordering of categories and custom taxonomy terms through a simple drag-and-drop interface.
• Disable Comments by click5 - Disable comments on your website and protect yourself from spammers.
• Easy Watermark - This plugin can automatically add image and text watermark to pictures as they are uploaded to WordPress media library. You can also watermark existing images manually (all at once or an every single image). Watermark image can be a png, gif (alpha channel supported in both cases) or jpg. It's also possibile to set watermark opacity (doesn't apply to png with alpha channel). For text watermark you can select font, set color, size, angle and opacity.
• embed-githubin - Shortcode for a box with a github project.
• Favicon by RealFaviconGenerator - Create and install your favicon for all platforms: PC/Mac of course, but also iPhone/iPad, Android devices, Windows 8 tablets, etc.
• Gallery Lightbox Lite - Displays your images gallery into the awesome and responsive lightbox slider with very easy
• GL Import External Images - Download and Insert images to WP Media Library from External URLs.
• Site Kit by Google - Site Kit is a one-stop solution for WordPress users to use everything Google has to offer to make them successful on the web.
• Health Check & Troubleshooting - Checks the health of your WordPress install.
• OMGF - Increase GDPR/DSGVO compliance and leverage browser cache by automatically self-hosting Google Fonts.
• WPCode Lite - Easily add code snippets in WordPress. Insert scripts to the header and footer, add PHP code snippets with conditional logic, insert ads pixel, custom content, and more.
• Lazy Load for Videos - Lazy Load for Videos speeds up your site by replacing embedded Youtube and Vimeo videos with a clickable preview image. Visitors simply click on the image to play the video.
• Lazy Loader - Lazy loading plugin that supports images, iFrames, video and audio elements and uses lazysizes.js. With manual modification of the markup it is also possible to lazy load background images, scripts, and styles.
• LiteSpeed Cache - High-performance page caching and site optimization from LiteSpeed
• Login No Captcha reCAPTCHA (Google) - Adds a Google CAPTCHA checkbox to the login, registration, and forgot password forms, thwarting automated hacking attempts
• MariaDB Health Checks - MariaDB Health Checks
• MB Custom Post Types & Custom Taxonomies - Create custom post types and custom taxonomies with easy-to-use UI
• MK Custom Shortcodes - My custom shortcodes.
• mk Hierarchical HTML Sitemap - MK modification of plugin. Generates menus from category hierarchies. Original description: Generates hierarchical HTML sitemap wich displays hierarchically sorted categories with posts links. You need add [htmlmap] shortcode at any page. It's working easy and fast. Super lightweight PHP code, without external CSS/JS files.
• MK Multi-column Tag Map - MK customized plugin, used to generate pages of movie reviews, fragrance reviews, etc. Original description: Multi-column Tag Map displays a columnized and alphabetical (English) listing of all tags used in your site similar to the index pages of a book.
• MK Sinatra Additions - My custom Sinatra theme code.
• Photonic Gallery & Lightbox for Flickr, SmugMug, Google Photos & Others - Extends the native gallery to support Flickr, SmugMug, Google Photos and Zenfolio. JS libraries like BaguetteBox, BigPicture, Gie Lightbox, LightGallery, PhotoSwipe, Spotlight, Swipebox, Fancybox, Magnific, Colorbox, PrettyPhoto, Image Lightbox, Featherlight and Lightcase are supported. Photos are displayed in vanilla grids of thumbnails, or more fancy slideshows, or justified or masonry or random mosaic layouts. The plugin also extends all layout options to a regular WP gallery.
• Same Category Posts - Adds a widget that shows the most recent posts from a single category.
• Search Regex - Adds search and replace functionality across posts, pages, comments, and meta-data, with full regular expression support
• Shortcode in Menus - Allows you to add shortcodes in WordPress Navigation Menus
• Shortcode Lister - A plugin to display a list of all the shortcodes available for use on the post and page edit screens.
• Shortcodes Finder - Find, test, disable, clean and get informations about the shortcodes in your Wordpress website posts, pages and custom contents (also in multisite network).
• Simple Local Avatars - Adds an avatar upload field to user profiles. Generates requested sizes on demand, just like Gravatar! Simple and lightweight.
• TaxoPress - TaxoPress allows you to create and manage Tags, Categories, and all your WordPress taxonomy terms.
• Sinatra Core - Additional features for Sinatra WordPress Theme.
• String Locator - Scan through theme and plugin files looking for text strings
• Transients Manager - Provides a familiar interface to view, search, edit, and delete Transients.
• UpdraftPlus - Backup/Restore - Backup and restore: take backups locally, or backup to Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, Rackspace, (S)FTP, WebDAV & email, on automatic schedules.
• Yoast SEO - The first true all-in-one SEO solution for WordPress, including on-page content analysis, XML sitemaps and much more.
• WP Crontrol - Take control of the cron events on your WordPress website.
• WP Memory - Check for high memory usage, include the results on the Site Health page, and provide suggestions.

Oh, yeah, you know I did.

Well, I modified it to do what I want, I didn’t rewrite it from scratch. But, yeah, things like having one caption stretch across multiple images, WordPress’s default gallery doesn’t let you do that. Mine does.

I also had to make sure it still worked with the lightbox plugin’s functions. It was a little bit of a pain.