Sprucing the OAT Software Page

One of the many projects I maintain is the open source Optimization Algorithm Toolkit (OAT). I developed this codebase over the course of my PhD (2005-2008) in the field of computational intelligence (metaheuristics), and as such the focus of the problems and algorithms codified in the project is biologically inspired optimization.

I spent today sprucing up the software page for the project. I created a new PHP version of the site, transplanted the content from the old static HTML page to the new version, and made the landing page attractive (in the 37signals sense).

The following screen shots provide a rough comparison, old on the left, new on the right:

I am defiantly not a master of the interface, although I'm satisfied with the upgrade. While putting the site together, I got to thinking about how I could improve the OAT project. I have a soft spot for the library given my huge time investment and my reliance on the software for my empirical-result focused dissertation.

By far the biggest improvement I can think of was documentation, specifically tutorials for using and extending the platform. As such, I intend to spend spare time over the coming months writing algorithm-centric and problem-centric tutorials for OAT in an effort to improve the usability and raise the profile of the project.