version 7

For New Year’s 2001, I relaunched Leather Egg with my first content management system — Greymatter. For New Year’s 2002, I relaunched Leather Egg with my second CMS — Movable Type. The site stayed that way for 2 years, with about 8 months of year 2000 content missing from the CMS. And it probably would have stayed that way this week had I not screwed up my Movable Type upgrade in some grand fashion. In the meantime, my hosting company has made it incredibly easy to set up WordPress for content management, and so I checked it out. And I took the plunge and won’t be looking back.

The big obvious change is the redesign, going somewhat retro and recovering the old logotype and the color scheme from Leather Egg versions 3 and 4. I had really, really, really grown to hate that yellow/brown design. Add a stylized egg silhouette, a photo of Boston’s Zakim bridge, and the building blocks from the Kubrick design for WordPress, and presto. Of course, now I want random images in the heading and want to bring back my title/snippet rotation.

The not-so-obvious but even bigger (and more time-consuming) change, was recovering the missing entries I still didn’t have in the content management system. I’m happy to report the blog is now complete and comprehensive going way back to my movie reviews beginning in February 1998.

There’s a lot more to do … not the least of which is to consolidate the galleries into the new gallery system and then redesign the gallery to fit the new design everywhere else, but I’ll get there. And now that I finally have a category system I’m happy with (and is incredibly easy to use), I’ve got nearly 400 entries that need to be categorized. The blog work is never done.

In the meantime, welcome to the new version 7 of Leather Egg … and Happy New Year!