Self-titled URLs for academics: obnoxious or ok?

I demand that the Printculture community weigh in on the matter. I have become dissatisfied with the structure/updatability of the Penn State pages, and am thinking about creating a set of professional pages using WordPress, which would allow me easily to update announcements about talks, books, and so on, while still also creating a structure for my syllabi, writing tips, and so on.

The free option is something like ehayot.wordpress.com, but unfortunately that keeps you from changing the design too much. The cheap option is to buy (for $12) erichayot.org, and host the site here on the Printculture servers (which any of the regulars could do if they wanted with their own names, btw).

But I’ve always been a little wary of the www.myname.org thing; it feels a bit self-aggrandizing. If it’s the only way to have an easily updatable and good-looking website, I may just do it anyway.

Thoughts?

7 thoughts on “Self-titled URLs for academics: obnoxious or ok?

  1. Artists of all kinds of media have self-titled websites and that seems to make perfect sense. Isn’t it really the simplest, most descriptive name for the site? What else would you call it?

  2. I dunno. I wish there were a site called something like academics.org to whom you could pay a small fee for the website ehayot.academics.org … and then have lots and lots of people do that with their own names. It would be fairly simple to set up. But: academics.org is taken (or I would take it) and I can’t think of another decent name for such a website.

  3. I don’t see this raising eyebrows among our students at this point. However, I will point out that my colleague Jason Wright has a personal PSU blog that he updates using WordPress, so arrangements along those lines are also possible.

  4. I agree with s.l.kim: eponymous sites are fairly routine these days, particularly given the low price of domain names and free hosting sites such as Google Sites. Plus, by using your name, your site and content will likely be easier to find via search engines.

    And I’m not saying all this simply because I have my own site.

  5. I did the self-titled thing (.com) for my website for the sake of simplicity more than anything. I hesitated for exactly the same reasons that you’re mentioning, but then decided, eh, this is the social media world that we live in. I don’t think it’s a big deal.

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