Thursday, August 31, 2023

Ahhh! My (professional) web pages disappeared!

My college has been redoing their web pages.  There are good reasons -- the pages we've had have become like a hoarder's attic, so full of random collected stuff that it's hard to find things you want, and all too easy to come across stuff that's dated.

What the powers-that-be decided to do, which kind of makes sense, is to change to a system where everything "public facing" will be on the internet, and then we'll move all the stuff that just matters to us (like class schedules, or memos) to a password protected intranet.   In order to make sure that that the public-facing stuff stays nice, only the official web curators can change it.  That is, we're changing from a system where, before, I could put materials I wanted to share on our college pages on the internet, to, from now on, a highly curated internet, with other stuff on the intranet. 

What about faculty pages?  My own pages, while we were going through the transition, were often held up as an example of how awesome it could be for faculty to continue to share cool stuff -- it's just that the pages would have to be updated by an official chain of people.  So, last week, when we did the change-over from old to new, it was a bit of a terrifying bummer that my main bio page is still there but that all of the sub pages (videos of my talks, my classroom resources, my CV, my research description) are all gone.  "But don't worry, they're all archived!"

Even though the main page is there, if you click through enough links, my new page is harder to find:  the address changed from "School/My.Name" to "School/Directory/My.Name". Dang, and of course this would happen right when I'm in the middle of applying for a Fulbright, where I want to keep referring various people to my materials so they can believe I'm a real person or get a sense of my work. Dang dang dang.

Even if this gets fixed (meaning, put back the way it was), it's our department coordinator who's in charge; I can't update my own pages when something happens without going through that other person.

I think I really need to get my own web domain and create pages that I can control myself.  Sigh.  Suggestions are welcome!

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