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Ask HN: What's a good tool for building a personal academic website?

7 points by eli_gottlieb ↗ HN
I've been advised that I should make a personal webpage, and my institution does give me space for one. What's a good tool for building the content?

I mostly just need to be able to list contact information, a picture, a publication list (God willing I'll have a publication one of these days), and random notes on whatever courses, teaching, and research I'm up to at the moment.

The constraint is that I know jack about hand-coding HTML, Javascript, or any of it. Sorry.

Ideas?

15 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 41.6 ms ] thread
dylanhassinger
wordpress

about.me

onepagerapp.com

eli_gottlieb
I don't think I can put up a blog engine or a link to an external site. The point was more to produce files that I can actually place on an institutional server, in plain HTML, from which they will be served.
bennyg
I would use www.webflow.com to build your pages, and then take the output CSS, HTML and JS that it exports and upload that. You could probably make a static CSS and a static JS that works for all of your pages and then just reference that in all of the others.
jcutrell
I actually thought about making this once - a CV generator that gives you a PDF and HTML files back, with a few themes to choose from. The idea would be that you can update it at any time through the system, and it would keep track of changes; maybe, eventually, this would feed into a network of sorts (think: who achieved my degree 6 years before I got it?).

Some word processors may be able to do this, but not to this level, certainly.

michaelmior
You may find what I did[1] in the same situation interesting. Although this was before I discovered the plethora of existing static site generators. I actually just rewrote my blog to use nanoc[2].

[1] http://michael.mior.ca/2010/12/02/blog/designing-an-offline-... [2] http://nanoc.ws/

eli_gottlieb
I think nanoc or Hakyll are more what I want: simple, static site that directs cleanly to text, mathematics, and downloadable files. Thanks!
michaelmior
Yeah, I don't really like my solution much either anymore. You should be able to get nice equations via LaTeX in any static site generator with MathJax[1]

[1] http://www.mathjax.org/

eli_gottlieb
Actually, Hakyll lists itself as including Tex support.
michaelmior
Cool! I hadn't heard of Hakyll before, but maybe this is a good excuse for me to learn some Haskell. I'm quite happy with nanoc for the time being now. I found the other solutions I tried at the time to be a bit too complex.
eli_gottlieb
>maybe this is a good excuse for me to learn some Haskell

I'm already learning Coq, so this is kinda the thought that went through my mind.

rmk2
Mhm. This one is a bit of a long shot, since it requires you to use emacs, but if that isn't a hurdle, have a look at org-mode.[1]

Org-mode has a pretty intuitive mark-up syntax and can export naturally to pdf (via LaTeX), odt and html (this is what you want)[2]. It uses a publishing module[3] with which you can also directly upload to a server via ssh/scp/sftp, and it allows you to specify extra files that should be uploaded with your main file (css, images etc). It deals neatly with internal and external links, internal links (inside or between your org-documents) are neatly converted for html. As a bonus, you can just stick your org-files into git/svn/bzr, i.e. a version control of your choice, since they are simple plaintext (though, again, it depends whether this is relevant for you).

[1]: http://orgmode.org/

[2]: http://orgmode.org/manual/Exporting.html#Exporting

[3]: http://orgmode.org/manual/Publishing.html#Publishing

jasonshen
Some great options here though most require some technical skill. Striking.ly is a YC company helping people build really simple and beautiful websites with no code.

http://striking.ly

sloanedavidson
Strikingly or Square Space could be a good fit for what you need. You don't have to know how to code and can choose from layout options to customize features.

https://www.strikingly.com/ http://www.squarespace.com/

They charge a monthly fee but would take care of hosting for you which saves you from having to buy a URL and host it somewhere. If you already own a URL you can point it there too.

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