Some time ago, I got tired of our conference webpage, which was hosted on a website of our, well, institution here (I won’t even try to explain the relationship between the said institution, the uni and the department for fear of being institutionalized as a result). That website is a terminally outdated Joomla, Web 1.0 and stuff. So I spent a day shitcoding hardcoding html+css for a simple landing page, here (at the time of writing):
Well, to be honest, the design was kinda inspired by the page that I had made for fun as a project for freecodecamp. Since the actual conference website lacks those funny parallax scrolling effects and inappropriate pictures from Wikimedia Commons, here it is in its entirety:
mockference (there’s no “go back” button though)
That’s probably a very sloppy design anyway, but, oh, my, those parallax pictures… I just love how they illustrate the most abhorrent issues in the scientific conference business.
And now, a bit of history
which means, here goes my incoherent rant; you can stop reading right now and go do something productive.
Several years ago, our glorious uni rejected our humble request to host the webpage of the conference on its 3rd-level domain (*.urfu.ru) using its Typo3 CMS. The reason they named was so stupid that even a man awarded Guinnes World Record for idiocy would find it hilarious. Namely,
…the conference is annual, and the webpage will be just sitting here doing nothing all the year round after the conference ends…
…implying that somebody actually needs the rest of the useless university website on a day-to-day basis. I bet that, e.g., the official statement on the anti-corruption policies is very popular. Besides, it had been, like, 30 years and this here annual conference with its archive was (and is, as of now) still here, duh, and wasn’t like it was going anywhere anytime soon. Its info page is one of the most accessed pages of our whole, ahem, institution, for G*d’s sake! What’s even more funny is that there are (and were, at the moment of our request) even crappier conferences hosted under *.urfu.ru…
What were you smoking back then, you ladies from the UrFU’s ”Center for Positioning and Brand Technologies”? Yes, this is a literal translation of an actual department name, and yes, this name and the intended functions of this department don’t make sense in Russian either. I guess, this whole situation was caused by perversely vague corporate policies enacted by crazy cat ladies.
Disclaimer: don’t get me wrong - as a rule, I don’t have anything against either ladies or cats.