MPLSART.COM Relaunched

Katie and I recently took over local arts event calendar MPLSART.COM and we launched this week!

Local fashion designer Emma Berg started MPLSART.COM in 2005 as a way to keep track of all the great art events around town. Shortly after, Kristoffer Knutson joined up and the site became a go-to resource for the best art events in the Twin Cities. Last May, they decided to close the doors after nearly 10 years. Updates to the site were increasingly infrequent in the later years, but the void was immediately felt among the arts community.

I pitched the idea to Katie of trying to revive the site and she was all in. We met a handful of times with Emma and Kristoffer and they gave us their blessing. We signed a contract, bought the brand for shiny silver dollar, and transferred the domain.

We immediately, put up a static HTML site listing a handful of events coming up. We ditched the Flash applet and started with a responsive design that mimicked Emma's branding so as to seem like we were not just domain squatters.

Since then, we've been doing small incremental changes to the site to get to our initial launch. In the software world, this process is called "agile" or "continuous release". All of this culminated in the initial milestone release that we launched with this week.  

I'll be writing more on the technical aspects of the site as well as our mission and future plans. Some of these were touched on in an interview with Sheila Regan for the CityPages.

To celebrate the re-launch, Katie and I are hosting a launch party this Friday evening at Public Functionary in Northeast. 

God, I love the Twin Cities.