Now that the title has caught your attention, I can take this opportunity to officially welcome you with open arms to my new web site, wosko.us. Here you will find my recently redesigned personal website (I have a technical website in the works as well). The new site has been redesigned from ground up to accommodate the list of demands I ask for in a site.

SimonWosko.com has been Retired

There are times in a website’s lifetime when change is not just needed but necessary. This happens to be one of those times for my personal website. My old site, www.simonwosko.com, was outdated, cumbersome and not terribly pleasing on the eyes. However, I am proud of it because it was built and designed from scratch, by me, using PHP, MySql and the Zend Framework.

Simon Wosko Web Site Screenshot

I have owned the simonwosko.com domain since 2000, with a minor lapse occurring last year. A miscommunication between the domain registrar and myself lead to a month of site downtime. This downtime got me to thinking, “what do I really use my personal site for”. The answer, nothing but to post my resume and serve as my presence on the web. This motivated me to rethink my online presence and how I wanted to be perceived on the web.

Out with the Old in with the New

For my new site, wosko.us, I have decided to go with the traditional personal blog rather than a custom built site. I feel a robust blog, and it’s accompanying software, offer far more capabilities then a custom solution. Hosting my site using a pre-built CMS like Wordpress allows me to focus more on the content rather than the code necessary to make it work.

• Photo Gallery – I tossed around the option of including a photo gallery and decided in the end to leverage the kPicasa plug-in for Wordpress. Pictures in the album are updated regularly, so please check back for updates. Each time a new album is created, I will also create a new post on this site to ensure my loyal subscribers are notified of the update. Subscribe today to stay updated.

• Me Around the Web (my lifestream) – One of my favorite features of this site is the integration of my online lifestream. You may have already noticed it over there on the right (that is of course if you’re on the site and not reading this via feed reader). The lifestream widget will display my activity on several popular social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Pandora and Last.fm. A big thanks to Darryn Hoyt for developing the template and providing the rudimentary code necessary to implement this feature. Nice job Darryn.

• Improved Resume – My resume has been updated with my latest experiences and published in accordance with the hResume micro format. If you’re not familiar with micro formats, you can read more on their official site, microformats.org.

• Contact Form – A major feature lacking in my previous site(s) was the ability to directly contact me through the site. In the past, I always took the easy way out by using a simple mailto anchor. Get in touch with me today.

I hope you enjoy the new site. Please direct any feedback regarding the site to me in the form of a comment on this post (see below) or contact me using the Contact form. I appreciate any and all feedback.