Today I've launched a completely rewritten version of jimmycuadra.com. When I originally built the site, my intent was on building a freelance business. After a few years, it's become obvious that my goals have changed. I've been working for a company full time and have decided that I greatly prefer the security of a full time job to all the hassles freelancing would involve. I don't want to deal with clients, I don't want to manage taxes and health insurance, I don't want to worry about tracking hours and billing. I just want to program.

With those new directions in mind, it was time to revamp my site with a simpler, streamlined focus. All I really need is a blog, a list of my major projects, and a brief bio. And that's exactly what the new jimmycuadra.com is.

The site is again built with Ruby on Rails but with another year's worth of experience working with Ruby and Rails. This time around it is being hosted on Heroku, where I am in the process of moving all my sites. The code for the site is now open sourced on GitHub along with my other projects.

I'd been hesitant to add new content to the site, knowing that this new version was imminent. Now that it's finished, I hope do more writing and screencasting.

I've also decided that, contrary to my original goal of ultimate accessibility, I am no longer supporting any version of Internet Explorer on any of my sites. I don't even check them in IE. I'm sure they're completely broken, and I don't care. My focus in web development has narrowed greatly, and anyone using IE is not my audience. I definitely wouldn't have this attitude working on a business project where cross-browser compatibility was important to the stakeholders, but on my own projects, spending any time on IE at all is literally a waste of time.

The new site is all about slimming things down: no unnecessary pages, a small number of content tags, integrated blog posts and screencasts, a simple design, easy deployment, one rendering engine to rule them all (Webkit) and motivation for myself to provider better, more frequent content.

Here's to a new era.