I used to ravenously read scholars’ websites as a Ph.D. student and loved seeing their progress. And I was frustrated when people wouldn’t update their websites, because our job as scholars is to share knowledge.
And then I entered a different stage in my career, and ran into two barriers. First, a practical one — there always seemed to be something more important to do than updating my website. Second, the idea of updating my website made me feel sick. Because updating a website made clear that I hadn’t published as much as I hoped, so it served as a source of comparison.
But comparison is the thief of joy, and I know fundamentally that I am making progress, even if it hasn’t resulted in as many published papers as I once expected of myself.
I thought that having Claude Code build me a clean new website would leave me little excuse not to update it. We have review cycles at the university, so a lot of what belongs on my website is easily accessible. And now I can just drop a new draft of a paper into a folder and the site updates itself.
The colors are our old Stanford Digital Economy Lab colors. The lab has since undergone a rebrand. But at some point, using Kyle Butts’ LaTeX template, I had made a TeX template with these colors, and they feel like part of my scholarly identity now.
If you’re reading this and haven’t updated your website this semester, consider this a gentle nudge. We — other scholars — want to hear about what you’re doing. You got this.