New web site (a.k.a. shameless self-promotion)

In case you’re interested, I have created a new personal website which you can find at www.roberttalbert.net. This isn’t a blog, although there is a small blog contained in the website for announcing additions and updates, but rather a “portal” for professional information about me as well as a one-stop shop for all my activities on the web. Right now it just contains a freshly-updated CV; the aforementioned blog; a page with links to my blogs, social bookmarks, and other aspects of my “web presence”; and a contact form. I’m working on (as readers know) an updated teaching statement as well as a scholarship statement, and once those are in a shape I’m happy with, they’ll be up there as well. And that’s probably all I’ll put there.

I conceived of something like this while revamping my CV, which is supposed to be an annual thing for me but which I had not done since 2005; I wanted to put some sort of web presence on the CV along with my address and phone numbers, but I didn’t want to just put this blog down as my one and only web activity, because it isn’t. Also, there was the University of Toledo blogging debacle, where apparently the editors of the student newspaper Googled me and printed (without my permission) a bunch of professional contact information about me. I think it’s becoming more and more important, as the amount of web activity I’m involved in increases, to identify myself intentionally and publicly with all the stuff I do so as not to leave things to the imaginations or Google searching of others.

I used Weebly to create that web site, by the way, and although I think it’s a little clunky to use, it does a pretty good job for creating lightweight web sites and I would recommend it for such purposes. The service is free, and so is domain mapping, so if you can pony up $10 for a domain name (like I did) the rest is no cost, which is nice.

Filed under: Blog announcements, Life in academia, Personal, Technology , Personal, professional, web site, weebly