Around here the month of March always comes in like a pig with National Pig Day (NPD) celebrated on March 1st. But, March of 2011 is also noteworthy for Porkopolis.org because three significant and long-planned site events occurred after our NPD celebrations.
New Additions at the Art Museum
The Porkopolis Art Museum recently added some fine examples of late nineteenth century advertising trade cards to its collection. These cards, advertising lard and featuring pigs, were created for the N.K. Fairbank Co. as advertisements for their household lard products.
The opening of this Art Museum display coincided with a two part blog post – Lords of Lard, pt. 1 and Lords of Lard, pt. 2 – that looks at some interesting aspects of the U.S. lard industry in the late nineteenth century.
The inaugural release from the “occasional” Reprint Series
The Arnold Ziffel Memorial Library also launched the Porkopolis.org Reprint Series this month. It will provide “occasional” reprints of significant, but difficult to find, pig-themed print materials.
The initial offering to the public is Razor-Backs by Tobe Hodge, the pen-name of Charles McIlvaine (1840–1909). This is a fictional sketch of the Razorback hogs native to West Virginia and caricaturing that part of the United States. It includes illustrations by the author.
An upgraded version of the site theme
A cleaner, lighter and faster version of the current site theme – v6.85 – went live this month. Many adjustments, error corrections and improvements were made in the CSS, XHTML and PHP code. The design and the function of this site were also augmented. Thanks to all who contributed critiques and suggestions.
Porkopolis.org still runs very happily with WordPress as the content management system (CMS) using a theme I developed in-house from The Sandbox theme of Andy Skelton and Scott Allan Wallick
This is the last major upgrade for the current v6.x theme “Single-minded Bestiary” and only very necessary tweaks of v6.x will still be considered going forward. I recently started rooting for a new v7.x site theme that is adaptable to the Porkopolis.org content.
Testing has begun on several WordPress themes including Ian Stewart’s Thematic framework and Justin Tadlock’s ThemeHybrid. I expect to launch a new theme early next year.
And so for Porkopolis.org, March comes in like a pig and goes out like a pig, rooting on…