PhD PhD PhD

Finally my PhD is online

After years of procrastinating and generally dicking around I finally did it - I put my PhD up online: The culture and rhetoric of the answer-poem, 1485-1625. Its actually taken more time get it out there than it did to write the thing, so I'm pretty pleased that finally people have a chance to read it. The online version isn't quite finished yet, but most of the rough edges have been smoothed out.

The website itself is relatively search engine friendly; however there are quite a few drawbacks caused by having to produce 364 webpages quickly. The website was created using the following methodology.

1. I took the original Word document and converted to PDF


2. Then using Adobe Acrobat Professional I converted the content to HTML


3. I cobbled together a pure CSS template very quickly indeed and added in the HTML content produced by Acrobat


4. I put in all the internal page navigation and pulled out mountains of extraneous HTML generated by Acrobat either using regexs or worse, by hand.


5. Lastly I ran through each page very quickly to optimise onsite for the most important features

This is admittedly a far from ideal way to get a website out into the market place; however it does seem to be paying dividends and the few pages that Google has indexed so far are already ranking very well indeed against Google Books results and .ac results. Once all 364 pages have been indexed then I'll see where we land and get on with some link building for my big fat baby.

Addendum 19/09/08

As an additional note, the online version of my thesis has now picked up 40 inbound .edu links and is performing very well indeed. A couple of hours worth of link building and it already ranking really high for some of the bigger search terms. As for monetising itself, its not really doing much, but this was never a profit making venture. So long as its getting plenty of readers and it makes enoughj to pay for its own domain name every year, then its a success.