This is my new home on the web.
It recently occurred to me that my personal website contained very little to no (personal) information beyond the stuff you can find on my institutional website at WHU. Like many fellow academics, I intended to set it up to showcase my research a few years ago when I was on the job market. It never reached that point and has become a more or less useless summary of publication titles.
This summer, I wanted to update some publications and needed to look at it. Frankly, it sucked (you may take a look at it through the wayback machine). I decided to use some of the spare time (do acadmics ever have that?) this summer to start from scratch. Given that I am not a big blogger and also bad at updating and maintaining servers (so anything Wordpress-based was off the table), I looked for software to create old-school ‘static’ websites. I finally settled on Hugo, which is incredibly fast, reliable, and straightforward to set up. This is my new take. I might add pieces such as reference material, and occasionally use this as a platform to express random thoughts in the future, but for the time being it is giving you a broad overview over my research interests. And I and hope it sucks less.
Even though many colleagues have their personal websites, I feel that we (i.e., myself included) as academics do not really use the opportunities that the web offers. Much has been written about the academic publication process, and there is some evidence that it offers room for improvement. Don’t get me wrong, academic journals fulfil many important functions - most importantly a certification function - but oftentimes, the process simply takes too long for interesting pieces of research, opinions, or thoughts that should be heard in a discussion to be disseminated via this channel.
If someone out there is interested in how I set up this particular website (it took me roughly a day, mostly because I needed to pull all abstracts, links, etc. of past papers together), please drop me a note - every academic should have their place on the web.