4:54 PM, October 12th, 2024
The other day I overheard a conversation between one of my professors and the student he is advising about how good it looks to potential employers when you have a personal website. While I personally don’t think a personal website is a huge contributor towards one’s likelihood of being offered a job, I figured that it certainly couldn’t hurt, and I also thought that having a personal website was pretty damn cool regardless of the potential to help you career-wise. I also had been thinking of starting a blog anyway, so I figured that I might as well kill two birds with one stone. I also thought that it would just be an interesting learning experience. I set up the site in wordpress, of course, and chose a template that was compatible with elementor. That template wouldn’t really be recognizable now, as most of it is totally different.
I used IONOS to host, and got the domain and the hosting for only about $80 for my first two years, which I think is quite reasonable. While this has mostly been a positive experience, there have definitely been many frustrations over the course of today and yesterday as I’ve set it up. For one, the menu bar in the professional page has a light yellow border between the logo and the menu items that is not present in the other pages. I have no idea why, but after a long time of trying to figure out how to remove it I eventually just decided it wasn’t worth my time. The main frustration has been things like that: tiny details and formatting issues that seeeeem like they should be easy to fix, but are actually painstakingly difficult. For example, I tried lining up the logo and the copyright, along withy my email in the bottom footer, and they absolutely refused to line up, even thought the formatting pane said that all were “centered”. Moreover, when they appeared centered in wordpress, they would never be aligned when I visited the actual website in another tab!
Nevertheless, I now have a personal website up and running through wordpress, I did it myself without wix or any of those limiting and over expensive paid website services. It only looks good on desktop, not on phone, but I don’t think I really care much about that. Also, the IONOS experience was good except for one detail: it took me an overly long time to navigate in the control panel when creating the website to the “WordPress” as opposed to “Managed WordPress” which was very easy to find and immediately came up when I visited the control panel which you have to pay extra for and is unnecessary.
I consequently now also have a blog, in which I plan to post regularly my thoughts about statistics, chess, literature, life updates of myself and others in my PhD program, presentations I’ve done, and anything else that I find interesting. I also don’t plan to spellcheck / check grammar of my blog posts, because it’s annoying and I’ll end up spending too much time re-reading and re-writing pieces of the post, and that’s not really what a blog is for, blogs are supposed to be imperfect, at least in my opinion. Anyway, I haven’t eaten all day, and it’s like 5 now, so I think I should probably go have something before I pass out. Good night, and good luck.