Web

We are currently working on developing the MishMash webpages. Since I don’t like adding and editing the same information in multiple places, I have been interested in whether the MishMash pages can (as far as possible) “automagically” collect information from other locations. When setting up our partner events pages, I realised that it was possible to collect most of the useful information (title, location, date, image) from the metadata of the pages already hosted on other websites. This makes it much easier to add partner events than if we had to set up our own pages on MishMash.no, which would also duplicate much content. The standard making this happen is called Open Graph. Since I didn’t know about this before I began my little adventure, here is a short overview. ...

During a Christmas dinner, someone commented that many texts are too long these days and that it would be nice to have shorter versions available. One could think of large language models (LLMs) as a good solution for this. However, a better conceptual starting point may be the the concept of stretchtext, coined by Ted Nelson back in the 1960s. I wrote about application writing as stretchtext here on this blog back in 2011. Then, I used the example of having to write both a 5-page and a 15-page application for the ERC Starting Grant. Now, I am curious about how we could use the stretchtext concept to improve contemporary reading and learning. ...

I have been running my blog with a self-hosted WordPress install for almost two decades, and I finally decided to move to a static website solution. The relatively rapid shift was triggered by a WordPress update that caused trouble with the paths to images throughout my blog. However, since my site was hacked a couple of years ago, I have pondered alternative solutions for running the blog. I have been tired of all the updates and security issues with a server-based content management system and figured that a static website solution would be more straightforward in the long run. My first web pages were based on plain HTML files, so I considered going back to such an old-school approach. However, there are many static web page solutions, so I decided to try a few different options. Here, I will discuss why I ended up with Hugo for my new page. ...

Earlier this year, I wrote about my 23 tips to improve your web presence. Those tips were meant to encourage academics to care about how their employee web pages look at universities. Such pages look different from university to university. Still, in most places, they contain an image and some standard information on the top, followed by more or less structured information further down. For reference, this is an explanation of how my employee page is built up: ...

I was challenged to say a few words about improving their personal web pages at the University of Oslo. This led to a short talk titled 23 tips to improve your web presence. The presentation was based on experiences with keeping my own personal page up to date, but hopefully, the tips can be useful for others. Why should you care about your employee page? Some of my reasons include: ...

Recently, I have been engaged in an internal discussion at the University of Oslo about our institutional web pages. This has led me to realize that a university’s web pages are yet another part of what I like to think of as an Open Research “puzzle”: Cutting down on web pages The discussion started when our university’s communication department announced that they wanted to reduce the number of web pages. One way of doing that is by unpublishing a lot of pages. So it was decided that all event pages older than three years should be removed. That may seem like a logical decision to some. After all, pages announcing activities that happened several years ago may be less relevant today. There is also evidence that these pages are not read very often. ...

Sometimes the easiest way of sharing files is to just put them in a open web directory. I came across this very detailed blog post about how to change the looks of an apache directory listing by editing the .htaccess file.

A few weeks ago I mentioned that University of Oslo now openly supports RSS- and Twitter-feeds from the official employee web sites. Now I see that social linking has also been embedded in the new profile, as can be seen for example here. These types of links have been around for some years, but many academic institutions seem to have been very reluctant when it comes to jump on the web 2.0 bandwagon. I don’t think adding a facebook/twitter button will change the world, but I highly support all initiatives that make universities more open. ...

University of Oslo is brushing up the web pages this year, and now the turn has come to my department. When I updated my official profile I found (to my big surprise) that it is possible to include RSS and Twitter feeds. Wow, not bad, not bad at all! I am very happy that the university sees the possibilities in promoting blogging and social fora among the staff. Another good thing is that publications are now automatically extracted from Frida, the Norwegian publication database that we have to use. Up until now we have had to manually create publication lists everywhere, so this is also a time saver. ...

A great little movie about the internet (html, xml, hypertext, etc.) by Michael Wesch, an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology from Kansas State University.