My new web address

My university cancelled all personal web pages—and what it means for me

The end of an era for personal web pages (at University Oldenburg)

The internet has its roots in academia and research institutions. For nearly three decades, I am running a personal website hosted on university servers, a practice I began already back in 1994 during the final stages of my diploma studies in High Energy Physics at TU Darmstadt. This is no coincidence - High Energy Physics is often considered the birthplace of the internet, where researchers developed the protocols and technologies that laid the groundwork for what we now know as the web. Over the years, as my academic career progressed, taking me via Tel Aviv University to various institutions across Germany, my personal website followed me, always finding a home on a university server wherever I went and serving as a reliable platform for sharing my research, thoughts, and personal projects.

That era has now come to an abrupt end. IT services at University of Oldenburg - my employer for quite some years now - decided to discontinue the service of “Personal Webspaces” by end of October 2024. This decision was made without any explanation and with just a month’s notice. They didn’t even provide an option to redirect visitors to a new page. By the deadline, all personal web pages (including mine) were shut down, and any remaining files were irretrievably deleted.

Even though this might not seem like a big deal to many, I can’t help but feel disappointed and a bit taken aback by this decision. Perhaps it’s because it feels like yet another reminder of how our society has shifted over the years — here, in the truest sense of the word — from the free, open internet of its early days to an (online) world that feels increasingly and unnecessarily controlled and regulated.

What This Means for Me

This means that I can no longer host my personal website at the university. The only sites allowed are official institutional pages, such as my group’s official site, which must be managed under the university’s CMS system. While I understand the need for modernization and consistency in internet services, this decision in itself feels incomprehensible and the lack of transparency and abruptness has left me at a loss for words.

Of course, I could simply go back to what I used to do in past, such as running the page on a web-server hosted on my own (university) workstation. Or, I could “hide” the page within the file structure of our institute's web server. But, just a few years ago, we were explicitly asked to migrate personal websites to official university staff pages. At the time, I followed this directive see my earlier blog post. Now, with this service shut down, I find myself having to migrate my website yet again. But if I move it to another university server, who’s to say the same thing won’t happen again in the future if yet another policy change comes along?

A new beginning: my own domain

To avoid this hassle in the future, I've decided to register my own domain berndblasius.de, ensuring that my web presence remains consistent and independent of institutional decisions. From now on I hopefully will never have to change links to my address again.

However, this also means that any scientific content I publish on my new site will no longer fall under the umbrella of the university. Instead, it will represent my personal ideas and opinions, shared to my readers (if there are any…) in my free time. Sorry, university!

I have migrated my site to Cloudflare Pages, to which I upload my files from a GitHub repository. After some initial trouble with setting up DNS entries and nameservers to satisfy Cloudflare servers, everything now seems to be running smoothly.

Closing thoughts

The transition has been frustrating and time-consuming, but I’m hopeful that having my own domain will make my online presence more resilient. While I regret that universities are moving away from hosting personal web spaces, I’m excited to explore the possibilities that come with this newfound independence.