David's World

January 7, 2006

A new image - streamlining the public Dave

If it's a political party or a multi-billion-dollar corporation, when it comes to representing themselves in public, everyone carefully streamlines what the public gets to see about them. To some extent, individuals can do that with themselves as well, and it's obviously infinitely easier to make sure you look good on your own than to make sure a bunch of egotistical management hounds and sleezy PR jerks look good together.

So the other day, I tried to streamline what I have on the web. That's not easy. A bunch of domain names and websites are scattered all over the place, starting from my very first www.davids-welt.de, registered in 1999 or so back when I was in Germany. Visually, it's even more difficult. I have a normal homepage, with CV and publications and a bunch of technical goodies for people to download. Then there's the blog that you are reading just now. There's a photo blog called The Big Trip with photographs from my travels. I also have one or two non-research web publications, among them an old and fairly well-linked study about the German dramatist Heiner Müller.

Reorganized and slightly streamlined, the visible structure is nice and simple. The blog(s) are on davids-world.com, the homepage is david-reitter.com because I intend to keep that name for another couple of decades, and the old German stuff remains on the .de domain for now. Everyone is redirected automatically to the new destinations.

There's a new common visual element. It's "David looking at the world from different perspective". Or simply, my picture stylized and rotated by 180 degress. See also: upper left corner.

The technical structure behind all this is almost too complex to be true (see diagram). I guess that's what happens when you want to spend minimum money and have maximum technology. Leaving out the details, I'd like to point out my cool new web host, Nearly Free Speech. They allow me to do all sorts of tech stuff, but only charge me for what really costs them money: bandwidth and storage. They're one of those "don't be evil, be fair!" companies that I've come to appreciate. And you get support from the guy who's actually in charge - no more e-mail support-by-templates. More about them another time.

The question remaining is how much we need to streamline our electronic business card. The thing is: I'm not a streamlined person. I wear masks, like everybody. So my web sites are always going to be slightly chaotic. Slightly.