New version

I’ve managed to update my website to the newest version of wowchemy (that’s the engine that, together with blogdown runs the show, behind the scenes). Most changes are really under the hood and, to be fair, you wouldn’t see a lot of what has changed, by simply browsing. I think both wowchemy and the latest release of blogdown, however, make the work easier — it’s actually quite a steep learning curve to get yourself going. Or at least it was when I first did mine: to be fair, the blogdown crowd have done fantastic work to simplify the whole process.

One thing that caught my eye is a little tweak that Alison Hill did with her own Hugo theme (Hugo Apéro), to add a little button that, when you click on it, says your name how you like to get it pronounced — I think that’s a very nice touch: sometimes I get people pronouncing my surname in ways that sound a bit weird and I can only imagine how bad it can get for people…

In fact, I thought that, in addition to stealing Alison’s idea, I’d add a litle bit of my own, by including the phonetic transcription (I know: that’s a massive nerdy thing to do — but I like it… :wink:!).

Other than my website, there kind of is a new version of me too — now that I’ve officially taken over as Head of Department. It’s been a month now and so far I still haven’t bankrupted the department or driven away most of my colleagues, which I take as a massive sign of success… It’s at times overwhelming (with several “emergencies”, things you need to react to very quickly), with a couple of issues to resolve very quickly (all positively, for now, thankfully!). But I’m still enjoying it — we’ll see how long this lasts…