🦉 Owlstown Newsletter #61
Hello Owlstowners!
It will be Thanksgiving in the US in a few days. I wanted to thank you all for using Owlstown to share your research online. You spread knowledge around the world and inspire others to continue learning and discover new knowledge.
Thank you for filing bug reports and giving ideas on new features. Owlstown becomes better because of you. I appreciate your patience while I resolve bugs and add new features.
Lastly, thank you for spreading the word about Owlstown with friends and colleagues. Word-of-mouth is the primary way that people learn about Owlstown. With your help, Owlstown has grown to host thousands of websites. You can see many of them featured in the Owlstown Academic Gallery.
Cheers,
Ian
Winners of the Best Personal Academic Websites 2025
Congratulations to the winners of the Best Personal Academic Websites Contests! The winners’ websites are truly inspirational. They are great examples of how to share research online.
I am proud to announce that 4 of the winners are Owlstowners. It is so cool to see Owlstown being used to create such high-quality websites.
Roberta Valtorta (Overall Best Personal Academic Website)
Akshata Naik (Owlstown Website Award)
Patrick Manser (Best Academic Portfolio Website)
Learning & Behavior Change Lab by Dr. Allie Sinclair (Best Research Lab or Group Website)
Show PDFs in full screen
I added buttons to the PDF block, so that visitors can view your PDF in full screen. There are also buttons to open the PDF in a new tab and to download it.
Heading anchors
You can now link to headings within pages. To use, hover over a heading and click on the pound sign (#) that appears next to the heading. The browser address bar will update with the anchor to the heading. You can copy this URL to link to the heading.
Turning images into links
You can turn your pictures into links by setting the URL property of the Picture block. This was a frequently-requested feature, so I’m glad to have finally added it.
Improved rendering of banners
Multiple users reported that banners appear grainy or blurry on their websites even after uploading high resolution images. I found the source of the problem and resolved it. If your website has a high-resolution banner, it should look better now.
Updated and cleaned up development environment
Having a working development environment is important in adding new features to Owlstown. In the past few months, I’ve been updating and cleaning up various aspects of Owlstown’s development environment.
Upgraded to Ruby on Rails 8.
Removed Bootstrap code and upgraded to Tailwind and DaisyUI.
Converted some Javascript code to Typescript code.
Removed use of
@applyin SCSS files because it prevented live updates when editing SCSS files.Removed a gem that slowed down rendering times during development.