Hi Everyone,

I hope you enjoy this major redesign of my personal home page. It’s one example that shows the timescale and reasons that things can go out of date.

I created my first personal home page when I was a doctoral student at the Institute for Astronomy (University of Hawaii) way back in the previous century (early 1990s). This was a simple html page with a few links to my research. Many university professors still have such pages.

Then at the turn of the century, when I arrived as a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley, I adopted Adobe Dreamweaver to create a fancier, more complex web site. This is what I’ve been using for the last 17 years.

But, lo and behold, just like music files or streaming have superseded CDs, the tablet and smartphone are more important than computers for very many people. My fancy web page became unreadable on smaller screens. For the 2018 update I decided to try WordPress. Now everything scales nicely on various devices at various orientations.

So, it seems that every 10–15 years new hardware and other advances demand a significant redesign of web content. By the year 2028 we will probably have to re-adapt everything for 3D virtual experiences. I’ll be up for the challenge!

Best,

Paul