Welcome to Hell For Leather 3

A new look, better functionality, photo galleries that work, easier navigation and improved surfacing of our best content. You’re looking at the latest, greatest version of Hell For Leather. Here’s a breakdown of the changes and what they mean for you, our readers.

Navigation: This remains close to what you’re used to; articles appear in reverse chronological order on the front page. But now, there’s separate tabs up top for different categories of stories: our Daily news stories, our large Frontlines features and our more easily digestible Positions pieces are up there, but so’s a link to our original films (more to come) and all our photo galleries. You’ll also find visual links to our best content throughout the site: up top in our featured boxes and highlighted in the boxes to the right of this article. Want to do a search? The search bar is on the top right and there’s tags over to your left, stories are organized around them.

Photo Galleries: Hopefully this is intuitive, click the photo gallery film strip in any story and the gallery will open, you can then cycle through the images by clicking on the thumbnails or the arrow buttons next to the images. Click the images themselves for larger versions you can save to your computer. This means we’ll be bringing you more shots and it’ll be easier for you to view them. Ready to go back to the article? Click the button below the gallery.

Comments: Three big changes: commenter registration, an RSS feed for comments and threading. Both have been chosen to make participating in our discussions better for you. Registration is quick and easy, but hopefully it’ll encourage people that have something valuable to add to do so while weeding out spam that doesn’t. We’ll be publishing a guide to good commenting soon, but in the meantime make them relevant, interesting and intelligent. With the RSS feed, it’ll be easier for you to track those replies to your witty zinger. Responses will also be made easier to follow as they’re indented to the right below the comments they’re responding too.

The Future: There’s more changes coming, stay tuned.