Show HN: Academic Bio – A simple static site generator for academic webpages

I set up academic.bio to try to make it easy for academics to have a website without needing to learn anything new (html, Jekyll, github, etc) and without the complexity of WordPress et al.<p>I want to keep it all open though so you still &#x27;own&#x27; your website, with the option to host at academic.bio (simple s3 static site), download the compiled html&#x2F;CSS to host yourself, or use the Jekyll theme directly (github.com&#x2F;academicbio&#x2F;academic-minima) depending on the level you&#x27;re comfortable at.<p>Thoughts and feedback welcome!<p>PS the next step is allowing quick import of publications. Where would people like to import from? Bibtex? ResearchGate?

I have to admit, I am normally not impressed by &quot;Show HN&quot;s from a practical viewpoint (most are technical demos, I think), but your page really stood out. I really like, that you keep it simple and allow to transfer the pages.<p>A feature request I would have if I published open-access papers (and that is fortunately more and more the case) would be to host them on your page.<p>Maybe that&#x27;s already possible (i.e. adding static files), then I have nothing to complain. :)

That&#x27;s awesome, I can Tweet this out for you. My lowly account has 1600 followers, but concentrated amongst academics. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;codonops" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;codonops</a>

Bah every time I have a good idea it&#x27;s taken :)<p>I recently went through the pain of setting up a simple static website for a math professor[1], and it really is depressing how polarized the options are considering you want the site to be easily editable by the party in question once it&#x27;s all set up. Either monolithic Wordpress-like engines that are really hard to bend to your will for first-timers (even me, a developer), or FTPing static files to some shady host provider.<p>The solution I settled on was hosting everything on github.io[2] and teaching the person how to use the GitHub interface sort of like a file browser&#x2F;editor so they can tweak little things without having to e-mail me.<p>Anyway my approach seemed to work out, but I would for sure have given this a try first if I knew about it. Congrats on getting it out there!<p>1. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;piotrkrasonmath.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;piotrkrasonmath.com&#x2F;</a> 2. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dougkoellmer&#x2F;piotrkrasonmath.github.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dougkoellmer&#x2F;piotrkrasonmath.github.io</a>

Great work! As a grad student I can definitely say it addresses a need :). For the publications, importing from bibtex might be a useful alternative, since all the fields are already there. It would save time compared to manually copy pasting each individual field and most researchers are familiar with it IMO.

This is great. I would love to have this.<p>But my univ gives me an &#x27;OpenScholar&#x27; access... (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;theopenscholar.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;theopenscholar.org&#x2F;</a>) it&#x27;s like this weird cms that I can&#x27;t seem to figure out. Here&#x27;s a question if anyone has experience with OpenScholar: can I somehow insert HTML pages -- that this tool will generate, and screw the OpenScholar system... while using OpenScholar? (because my univ. won&#x27;t let me simply upload HTML pages, it makes me do everything in OpenScholar)

The biggest problem I see with academic websites is that their publications are always out of date. Google scholar has always more recent publications listed. Do you have any plans to fix that? I think most academics have their faculty website profile and naybe a google scholar profile. I think your generator needs to be automated because otherwise it is just another site you have to update every tine you publish a new paper.

This looks good. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jemdoc.jaboc.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jemdoc.jaboc.net&#x2F;</a> comes to mind as one precursor that a number of academics have chosen, but it falls in the (marginally) more complicated categories of &#x27;command line&#x27; and &#x27;markup language&#x27;.

Pretty amazing, maybe you could let universities have their own domains and I think this would be a huge success!

Cool! I&#x27;m really hoping we can stop seeing academic web pages that look like they&#x27;re trapped in the 90s.

I&#x27;ve wanted to do the dame thing for years because I&#x27;m always frustrated by colleagues or other academics with no online presence.<p>This is awesome. The resulting web pages are very nice, and the openness is (no lock-in) is really a good thing. Thanks for making this exists!

A good idea!