why making a new personal website?

I have (another) new personal website. Welcome to it!

This is the first post on the site’s blog, so I guess it is a good place to talk about the reasons of bulding yet another personal website.

My first website was www.carlossmwolff.org, which I built during my PhD around 2015 and kept online for 3 years. Its focus was personal content (such as photography, geek blogs and stuff like that) rather than academic. It was a site built in Wordpress, and managing it never felt very pleasant to me: it was clunky and I never felt like I could really personalize it without resorting to external pluggins, templates and thing like that. Eventually I got tired of mantaining it and paying the hosting fees didn’t feel like worth it.

Later, in 2020, I started a junior leader position at UAM, and I felt I needed an academic landing page. I used Weebly to create this one. It was easy to create something with a nice look, plus it was free, but I missed having my own domain, and the editing experience was even worse than Wordpress. On top of that, navigation on that website felt very slow. In the end, I barely never remembered to update the page, probably because it was not fun doing so.

At some point I heard about GitHub pages, and asking ChatGPT about it I ended up learning about Jekyll and the al-folio theme for academic websites. This is precisely what I needed! This approach has many advantages:

• The site is a GitHub repo made of plain text files which I can clone and inspect easily in my computer (instead of an obscure Wordpress site hosted in a random server)
• Pages are built with Markdown, a very simple markup language that anybody using e.g. Jupyter notebooks is familiar with.
• Hosting in Github is free, and adding your own domain for 10$ a year is very simple to do.
• You can easily add cron jobs as workflows running scripts with Github Actions.
• The end result is light, readable and really beautiful!

Having a lightweight website stored in plain text files which I can complement with custom scripts is just what I wanted! For now, I am very happy with the result. I hope to write a follow-up post talking about the first tweaks I did to the theme and the custom scripts I have added, the main one being a python code that scrapes all my papers and citation info from Google Scholar and automatically builds a publication metrics summary in my publications page.