Steinski
Steinski (aka advertising writer, DJ, and record collector Steve Stein) produced his first record in 1983 in New York just as the young hip-hop scene was gathering momentum. “The Payoff Mix” became the first record in a series now known as The Lessons. The series quickly became highly sought after collectibles and led to homage records by DJ Shadow, Cut Chemist, DJ Format, and others. This has given him a unique view point on the development of hip-hop, and especially its often frought relationship with copyright and sampling laws. While still working in advertising, he maintains his own platform to respond to the world around him, a place where fans can connect with him and somewhere he can continue to enthuse the great music he discovers and produces.
The Steinski.com website has been established for several years running off a custom-built content management system. While this served his basic requirements it meant adding new functionality was very difficult. After careful consultation with Steinski we agreed that the Wordpress blogging platform (with its integrated user commenting, rich content editing and the wide range of available plug-ins it presented) was too appealing to ignore.
The biggest challenge in moving the site over to Wordpress was migrating the hundreds of archived articles from the custom database into Wordpress. We developed a suite of scripts in PHP to automate this this process. Only after going through low level database research, rigorous testing and manual content review could we begin to actually migrate the content.
After successfully migrating the entire database and all the associated multimedia content the hard work was complete. We integrated many of the standard Wordpress features like an RSS feed, full site search, automated archiving and vastly simplified multimedia embedding. We also gave the website design a much needed update using the latest XHTML and CSS layout practices.
Check out www.steinski.com if you’re interested in music, copyright or politics.
Screenshots
These screeshots were taken at the time of site launch, the site may have changed since then.
