Happy New Year, Owlstowners!

🎉 2021 was a great year for Owlstown! This year, about 700 academics signed up for an account in Owlstown. 300 of you completed your academic websites and are featured in The Directory of Academic Websites.

🚀 Owlstown reached 100 subscribers! Thank you so much! Your support drives the development of Owlstown into the premier website builder for academics. Your support also helped me upgrade Owlstown servers (discussed below).

⭐ You accomplished so many things this year and shared them on your websites. Looking forward to see what you will accomplish in 2022!

What's new

Heading into 2022, I made several updates to improve the speed of Owlstown.

1. I moved Owlstown to faster servers with more memory and faster CPUs, which means your website is served more quickly and reliably to your audience.

2. [Rails nerd alert] I updated the Owlstown API to use the ActiveModel::Serializer gem with the OJ (Optimized JSON) gem.

3. [Another Rails nerd alert] I changed the Owlstown editor to use Turbolinks to refresh the preview page after an update. Changes appear more instantaneously and there is no annoying flash of empty content.

From the community

Jacqueline Shaia wrote about Holiday Gift Ideas for the STEM People in Your Life! and Perspectives on the P-Value.

Falko Schmidt was selected as a participant in "Humboldt meets Leibniz" 2022.

Emily Cliff meets with an old collaborator and congratulates them on their new lab.