Welcome to the new NicholasArmstrong.com

There comes a time in every website’s life when it becomes apparent than a newer, more useful version is necessary.  For NicholasArmstrong.com, that time was a year ago.  But it wasn’t until recently that I had the time to undertake a revamp, and what you see before you now is the result.  Welcome to NicholasArmstrong.com – version 2!

The old version – NicholasArmstrong.com version 1 – is still available for history’s sake at http://v1.nicholasarmstrong.com; however, since I’ve upgraded to a newer version of Wordpress and rolled forward all of the version 1 era posts, all of the old links should still work and it won’t be necessary for anyone to actually use version 1.  If you notice anything missing, please do let me know.

As part of the revamp, I’ve changed the organization a little bit.  My career portfolio has been updated heavily edited, and now resides at http://www.nicholasarmstrong.com/portfolio.  I’ve removed the references section (newer references are available directly from me), and the work projects and samples section has been merged with the top-level projects category, since it seems to fit better with that content.  Employers and Education have both been completely rewritten into the new employment history and academic history pages, with slightly less content but, I think, a much better presentation (with pictures!).  Outside of that, it’s pretty much the same; the projects section has a slightly larger amount of content, the about page has been updated, and the front page now features the last 3 posts instead of just a generic message from me.

My goal for this revamp was to use existing technologies to produce a highly functional web presence, and I hope I’ve achieved that goal.  Version 2 is built once again on the Wordpress blogging engine, and this time uses the Thematic Theme Framework as a base for its style.

While I was developing, I also came across the excellent YSlow and Google Page Speed plugins for Firefox.  YSlow in particular made a surprisingly huge difference to how fast this site renders; both tools give you a list of things to fix to ensure your pages load as fast as the Yahoo!/Google homepages do.  This site isn’t quite that fast, but reorganizing my CSS and Javascript and aggressively setting caching headers should make things reasonably snappy – and a surprising amount better than before I started! (now, if only my hosting provider wasn’t on the west coast…)

One other thing to note: if you have any problems with the site, please do let me know by sending an email to ‘contact’ at this domain (nicholasarmstrong.com).  I’ll be tweaking a few things over the next couple days, too, so if you see a couple minor things changing, don’t be alarmed.

Finally, there’s a small bit of new content available as well; primarily, posts on alternative uses for XAML, as well as one with tips for writing work reports.  Now that the new site is up and running and allows me to do things like post code (which the old version struggled with), I hope to get into a somewhat more frequent posting rhythm, and not leave the site dormant for months!

Enjoy!

Nicholas