Old site, new site and the Slav squat effect

There comes such a time, every decade and a half or so, when a man needs to update his online presence.

With social networks, websites are largely obsolete as a way to share personal and professional information via the Web, but I cannot bring myself to dispense with mine entirely, in the same way that I would never destroy a book. I guess I feel that the relationship between books social network profiles and personal websites is similar to that between websites and books. The comprehensivenes of the information and its presentation, as well as the time and mind share it takes to create each of these repositories seems to be diminishing as we create more efficient ways of disseminating data about our personal and professional lives.

Anyhow, if I am not willing to part with this relic of the past, it does not do to shove it to the digital equivalent of a dusty attic and keep it there, even if that was precisely what happened to my website for the last 7 or 8 years. There was just always something more important to deal with and I kept it out of my mind, relying on the rationale that nobody views it anyhow. There has been an occasional e-mail where someone would think that I am still in Trento, although that was years ago, but I managed to to screen that out very successfully. In my defense, some of the coolest people I had the pleasure to meet in academia and my area od research tend to take a simmilar approach (check out Andrew Zisserman’s website).

Two things finally pushed me to “revamp” my site:

1. I realized that people were actually checking out my website, when a colleague of mine used my photo from there to create a Slack emoji, he named “Duba’s Slav squat”. It was actually quite sucessful within the Tandemlaunch team.
2. I was putting up some code on GitHub, for a recently accepted journal paper, and saw that GitHub now allows you to create your personal and project pages directly from the repository.

At my core, I am a computer geek and a programmer, so I always tended to edit my website in simple text editors and being able to publish it using git was too good to miss out on. It still took some time to migrate what made sense to migrate and add a trickle of information to make it just a bit more useful.

I will never have the time to maintain my website as it should be maintained. There are just so many hours in a day and so many more interesting things to do. But, at least, on GitHub it will be easier to maintain and I might feel inclined to do some maintenance more often.

So there you go. Enjoy the new look and just to be conistent and preserve the Slav squat legacy, here is a reminder of what the previous incarnation looked like.