I integrated a scrolling blog (via an i-frame) into the homepage I had up while doing the job search -- coding it that way to visually shrink the blog a bit, still include the other features of my homepage, and since it was through an i-frame, keep the blog contents away from the spiders. I've since taken that page down, but it worked sort of like what I have up now (blog at left of screen) at:

http://students.washington.edu/spiegel/indexblog.html

Let me know if a screenshot of the old page would help. Cool project.

The other thing you made me realize is that I'm really looking for professional sites that break the normal conventions. So Collin's site, while not integrated with his blog, also moves away from the more standard form of most professional home pages.

... at various times I've had the ol' traditional CV linkable from the site, along with teaching philosophy and so on ...

http://www.echonyc.com/~janedoe/

Charlie, my home page (jerz.setonhill.edu) contains a link to my blog, though I generally give out the URL of my blog (jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog) in public situations.

In practice, I can see that the content of my home page is more like an "about" page than an entrance.

In an earlier configuration of my academic site, my professional home page included the most recent five or so links from my weblog. But in observing students type in the URL of my hope page, I saw that the vast majority were just looking for my office hours or looking for the link to an online syllabus. So, in an effort to reduce clutter on my home page, I eliminated the weblog feed and replaced it with a link.

You might also want to consider jill/txt or thinking with my fingers, as both of these bloggers don't actually teach in English -- thus their professional life in English creates an identity that occupies a different linguistic space than their teaching. (I imagine their students are far more likely to know English than ours are to know Norwegian, so who knows how much water this point holds.)

Charlie, I wonder if it might be useful to go through the Crooked Timber blogroll, and just quantify all the links that you see. And you might also look at one of the Yahoo categories as archived by the Wayback Machine to see what rhetorician home pages looked like, say, in 1998.

I hope that was helpful...

Dennis G. Jerz

Jerz's Literacy Weblog

I was looking at how your blog links to an about page which has all the cv information, etc. Still, you seem to be one of the rarety's that I could find in English. A large percentage of people don't link to their professional lives from their blog. Seems strange to me given the academic work many are doing.

I also like how your homepage is functioning as a portal for students. Many teacher professional sites are clearly constructed for that hiring committee or interested colleague, not a fusion of so much as you are doing. And in your case, the CV, etc., is two clicks in.

Well, I don't have my CV or teaching philosophy online at all, though I do have links to my research. ,y blog is my only professional website and I gave it to the hiring committee when I applied for my current job. The CV and teaching philosophy were included in the application letter, anyway.

There must be many others?

I've been focusing on teachers in English (mostly, rhetoric and composition studies), trying to provide examples from others within our field figuring this is the best way for the GTA's to get a feel for what they might do in terms of building their online professional identities. I wish I had more time to really go through this and look more carefully both within my field and across other disciplines, rather than having it be more of a vague impression of what I'm seeing in my field coming from a couple hours of blogroll surfing and looking for CV's/professional sites.

But it certainly raises the issue of how bloggers are presenting themselves as academic bloggers. What are the reasons for more direct or indirect association? Are people linking to their research, as you are doing? Or is the blog this shadow academic thing that doesn't get tied to other more profesional versions of ourselves? Is is too personal to tie to our more professional lives in some instances? Do we want to make the blog the main representation of our professional ethos, like in some of the examples above? Or CMS with class communities intertwined, in Matt's case? Or blog/resource hub for students and everyone as in how Dennis has setup his site?

All of this probably ties into our concerns about how blogs are accepted as academic activities and how it will affect hiring, tenure, promotion, and interpretation by other academics/peers who find our blogs on the web, as well as the fact that there are no established best practices. We seem to be feeling our way, some of us playing it more safe than others, some able to be more risk taking than others.

I'm pretty much an outlier here, I guess, since I'm not in rhet/comp/English and I'm also not concerned about hiring or tenure/promotion committees at this point in my career. But I do think my decision to make my weblog my primary contact point was linked to those things, since I know I don't have to be worried about people coming to my website and expecting a traditional, professional site. (That's not to say that some people don't come to my website expecting to see those things, but that I don't really care if they're disappointed.)