I’ve done a round of cleanups on my home page, including links where appropriate to published versions of things that previously had links to SSRN drafts, complete citations, etc. Also tied ‘em all up together in a single “recent papers” list, forgoing the annual sublists. … I’m aware that some friends and colleagues have fancy homepages. But it seems to me that the more bells and whistles it has, the harder it is to update regularly—is that so? (Or is it just a matter of having appropriate software?) The pages I know of that are both fancy and constantly updated are more of the promotional-site-for-one’s-public-intellectual-career type than of the research-and-teaching-stuff type. In comments, I encourage readers to identify particularly good examples of academics’ homepages. Who’s setting a high standard?
I’ve been thinking about this meself, as my home page is badly in need of updating, but have been vacillating between doing a fancy looking homepage with Dreamweaver or similar (advantages: can have RSS feeds on the side; disadvantages: given my lack of any artistic talent or familiarity with CSS, is likely to take a lot of time), a basic text-based job with LaTeX and/or Markdown (advantages: quick and easy to do; disadvantages: needs some aesthetic chops to make it look un-blah), or Movable Type (advantages: easy to update; disadvantages: do I really need more bloggy-looking output on my website?). Any opinions on the above? And also – on Jacob’s question – who out there has a good-looking and useful homepage that I or others can borrow tips from?
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Ariel Rubinstein. Not necessarily useful, but certainly good looking.
http://arielrubinstein.tau.ac.il/
I have undergrads create and update them.
I did away with mine entirely a few years ago. (The dept. does one for me, but I don’t have anything to do with it).
I don’t miss it, at all, ever.
Henry: Jeff Lax’s homepage is excellent. I recommend you copy it.
Chris: My homepage to be useful. It’s a convenient way for me to find my old articles. But I guess this would work just as well if somebody else were to set it up for me. I put the photo, bio, and cv on the home page because people kept asking for this information.
Learning the basics of CSS to present something basic that isn’t that difficult (in fact, knowing LaTeX, it’ll be that much easier to pick up) — and I find it fun. To make something really glitzy takes a while, but doing basic things is pretty simple.
You can also create a site at the Berkeley Electronic Press that does most of this and makes it relatively easy to manage:
http://works.bepress.com
First, I don’t think “homepages” are very useful anymore (they are static because they’re by definition too difficult to update; blogs are way better).
I’m no longer an academic, but my homepage (http://www.spagnoli.be) may still be a good example (but I would say that, wouldn’t I?). Mostly basic html. The flash and java that is used comes from third sources. Trying to learn this stuff isn’t a good idea for an academic (I think we have better things to do). I would advice to use freely available tools as much as possible (eg gigtide for cv’s, ssrn for papers, delicious for interesting links etc.) rather than reinventing the wheel, and doing it badly.
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