Personal Website

We support department members in creating personal websites to share information about their own activities at UC Berkeley, such as their research groups, publications, courses, and other academic work.

We can support two models for hosting personal websites: GitHub Pages-based sites and traditional HTML hosting.

Modern alternatives not directly supported by SCF include Netlify and bCourses sites.

Some platforms like Google Sites have been deprecated for accessibility considerations since cannot adjust the underlying HTML,

GitHub Pages-Based Sites¶

For faculty and students who want to use GitHub Pages to publish their personal websites, we provide support for hosting and domain management. This approach can be particularly advantageous for:

• Reproducibility: Use automation tools and workflows to keep your site content up-to-date.

• Collaboration: Delegate authoring and content management to collaborators, students, or research group members

• Version control: Track changes to your website over time using Git

• Modern tooling: Use static site generators, markdown-based tools, and continuous deployment

How It Works¶

We create repositories under the berkeley-stat organization on GitHub for your website, and facilitate the creation of departmental subdomains such as these examples:

These subdomains point to your GitHub Pages site, providing a professional departmental URL while maintaining all the benefits of GitHub-based hosting.

Getting Started¶

Contact consult@stat.berkeley.edu to request a GitHub Pages-based personal website. We will:

1. Create a repository under the berkeley-stat organization

2. Set up the departmental subdomain for your site

3. Provide you with access to manage your repository

You’ll then be able to use GitHub Pages with your choice of static site generator (Quarto, MyST, etc.) or plain HTML/CSS/JavaScript.

Traditional HTML Hosting¶

Department members can publish documents and data on the web by uploading files to their computing accounts.

Guidelines¶

Only individuals who are associated with either the Statistics or Biostatistics departments are eligible to use this resource to distribute information. Participants must observe all departmental and UC campus rules and regulations, and all copyright laws. The SCF reserves the right not to post submitted material.

Graduate students may maintain their own homepage using the following guidelines:

• Posted material at the top level home page is limited to information related to the individual’s academic interests. Listed below are examples of the type of information that is appropriate for the top level home page:

  1. Biographical information (including the student’s photograph).

  2. Dissertation abstract.

  3. Technical reports (with the signed approval of faculty advisor).

  4. Data sets (with the signed approval of faculty advisor).

  5. Links to other professionally relevant sites.

• Personal information can be included in a sub-level home page that is clearly identified as containing personal information. This area can include links to sites that are not related to to the individual’s academic work.

• The posting or advertising of personal items for sale and the posting of any published material (including articles authored by the student) is forbidden.

Creating HTML¶

Many applications can generate HTML files and you can probably export to HTML from your favorite application suite. LaTeX, Google Docs, Microsoft Word, TextEdit, and Mozilla SeaMonkey are good places to start.

Other approaches to creating HTML include:

1. Modern markdown-based tools such as MyST and Quarto.

2. latex2html will convert a LaTeX document to HTML. Here is a template tex file and here is the accompanying jpeg figure that is used in the tex file. To create the HTML, run latex2html latex2htmlExample on any SCF machine. If you want to have all the LaTeX section in a single HTML rather than separate HTML files for each section, do latex2html -split 0 latex2htmlExample.

3. You can use the knitr package in R to convert from R Markdown (.Rmd) and Sweave (.Rnw/.Rtex) files with embedded R code to HTML. Load the knitr package in R and then run “knit2html file.Rmd”, replacing “Rmd” with the appropriate extension, as necessary. Contact consult@stat.berkeley.edu if you have questions.

Setting up the web area¶

You will need to deposit your HTML files into a user-specific directory, /accounts/web/public/username/, on the SCF. View your site at the address https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~username/. Your files will be available immediately on the website, though you may need to reload your browser to see the changes. Make sure that your files are readable, e.g. chmod go+r filename.html, otherwise the public will not be able to view them. You can make use of this to hide content as well, e.g. chmod go-r filename.html.

Redirecting to Another Web Page¶

If you want to migrate your website to another provider and redirect people to the new site, you can create an index.html file of the form below, replacing the example URL with your own:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url='https://example.com'" />
  </head>
</html>

Password protected web areas¶

Use Google Drive to share material if you need to have collaborators access restricted content over the web.