New look for the site

Last year I put some work into moving our personal site off of a Python code base running on Apache to a Java/Wicket/Hibernate code base running on Tomcat, and I finally got around to getting it on the live site today.

I made the change for a couple of reasons. The first was that I was going to be moving to a new position at Cisco, which was using Java/Wicket/Hibernate, but the move was not going to happen for a couple of months, and I wanted to ramp up early on the technologies, so what better way than to re-write our site from the ground up – jump in the deep end as it were.

The second reason was that while I like Python, it really is more of a scripting language than something that is good for writing applications in, and it does not encourage you to maintain good code hygiene, and thus I had let the code become something of a tangled mess that was hard to make changes to unless I was in it pretty often. I think I have structured my code a bit better with the new site, so I should be able to come back to it in 6 months and make some changes without trying to figure out what moron wrote the code and why he did it the way that he did 😉

Third but not last, the newer technologies are going to make it easier to add dynamic content to the pages that do exist, without doing complete overhauls of the pages. Hence the links to current blog and twitter posts from the front page.

Hope you like the new look!

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