
Ask HN: What's a good tool for building a personal academic website? - eli_gottlieb
I&#x27;ve been advised that I should make a personal webpage, and my institution does give me space for one.  What&#x27;s a good tool for building the content?<p>I mostly just need to be able to list contact information, a picture, a publication list (God willing I&#x27;ll <i>have</i> a publication one of these days), and random notes on whatever courses, teaching, and research I&#x27;m up to at the moment.<p>The constraint is that I know <i>jack</i> about hand-coding HTML, Javascript, or any of it.  Sorry.<p>Ideas?
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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-...](http://michael.mior.ca/2010/12/02/blog/designing-an-offline-
cms.html) [2] [http://nanoc.ws/](http://nanoc.ws/)

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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!

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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/](http://www.mathjax.org/)

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eli_gottlieb
Actually, Hakyll lists itself as including Tex support.

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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.

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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.

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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/](http://orgmode.org/)

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

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

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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/](https://www.strikingly.com/)
[http://www.squarespace.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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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.

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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.

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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](http://striking.ly)

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onion2k
Jekyll is nice for running a local blog that you can upload to a server as
static HTML - [http://jekyllrb.com/](http://jekyllrb.com/)

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dylanhassinger
wordpress

about.me

onepagerapp.com

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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.

