New personal page, and a review of new Google Sites

Google has being slowly promoting their new Google Sites for about a year now, and recently I've moved most of my website to this new platform. Behold:

https://sites.google.com/view/khakhalin

Pros:

• It looks really pretty, with these large sliding images on top and everything
• Looks perfect both on a wide screen and a mobile phone (old google sites couldn't cope with a phone screen at all). I was critical of this feature at first, as I thought they were pushing the phone layout a bit too aggressively, but it turns out that I was just formatting it wrong. If you just add one block of text below another, sure, it will look poor, kind of like mobile wikipedia, when opened on a computer. But what you should do is add columns, or put images on the side. Create a matrix. In a mobile format it will nicely reshape into a column-vector, so that's the best of both worlds.
• Intuitive interface: it totally feels like Google was inspired by the recent development of Paper by Dropbox (which is awesome by the way), as the interface is clean, clear, and easy to use. It may be a bit harder to move large blocks around, but still possible.
• If you know html, you'll appreciate that the blocks you add follow <div> mentality, and there's a logic behind div-embedding. While it is not shown to the user explicitly, if you ever worked with divs, you'll immediately recognize the structure (and beauty) of it.
• I like the little magic thing they do when you put images behind text (they adjust the color of the font and the lightness of the image)

Cons:

• For now they don't support tables, and I need tables to publish protocols. But I think the Google team promised to eventually introduce them.
• For now they only allow 1 level of subpages, but this thing they explicitly promised in one of their blog posts, so it should, theoretically, come live within about a year.
• Very few styles for now, and it's impossible to create your own styles, but then again I think it will be changed in the future.
• Impossible to attach files to the page, which was a very nice feature in old sites, both for hosting large-resolution images, and for uploading pdfs. I'm not sure whether they plan to implement it; I hope they would, otherwise I'll have to use external ftp storage for files.

But overall it definitely wins over Wordpress and Weebly, in my opinion, and hey it's free!

Google as a bibliography software

It looks like Google have introduced some bibliography software functionality to their Google Scholar. Now you can add Google Scholar results to your personal "library" of papers. And you can also assign labels (essentially - tags) to articles.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/scholar/help.html#library

The interface for adding labels is slightly awkward (a bit too Gmail-style for my taste), but usable: to add a label to a paper you should first create a label (it will be empty just after you created it), then click on the paper title, get to the "paper page" (where the abstract is whoen), and there use a drop-down menu. A bit too many clicks to enjoy the process, but it's usable.

Linkedin endoresments

I like how on Linkedin I have 7 endorsements for "confocal microscopy" (which I in fact only tried for about a week), but just 1 endorsement for "patch clamp" (which I did for 3 years). Naturally, all from people who knew me ~7 years ago (before I tried either). Is not it nice?

Also one endorsement for "Communication audits" (I don't even know what this thing is. How did it even get there?)

Conclusion: endorsements totally don't work if most of your connections are from your previous career. People just choose words that sound nice, and then via positive feedback (most endorsed skills being shown at the top) these flukes perpetuate, and get written in stone.

I am now tempted to delete "confocal microscopy" from my list of skills altogether =)

On Researchgate

As people around me are designing their posters and "science cards" (aka "business cards") for the SfN meeting, I see several of them using QR codes that link to their Research Gate profiles.

Now, I do find ResearchGate useful. It gives you space to host your papers, so that people could download them for free, bypassing the paywall. It also comes up pretty high in Google results, so if you want to look professional in Google search, you'd better start an account there. As well as at Linkedin, Google Citations, and Mendeley.

But at the same time, it is just such a half-baked, half-functional site! If a person, a casual visitor, is not registered there (and also logged in by default!) it doesn't even allow them to see your profile! Instead it produces a pop-up, and then flanks the profile with some ridiculous invitations to register that together take up almost half of the screen. Compare it to Linkedin that at least shows your CV all right, even if the visitor is not logged in to the system.

And also ResearchGate just isn't flexible enough to store your CV. It can represent your publications rather decently, and you can put your awards there, and maybe your positions and education history are also OK, but they totally don't have a proper section for teaching experience. They have some weird "Skills" section, that is common in Resumes, but aren't traditionally included into CVs. But they don't have a good way to reflect your teaching. It's just not an optimal way to store a CV online, and certainly not the best way to represent it.

Or maybe I am just too harsh on them?.. I don't know.

Surely it's still better than nothing. But every time I visit ResearchGate, can't help but feel the pain from seeing all these opportunities wasted.