Thanks for stopping by. I am working on this project already for quite a while and it is great to find some people who think it's worthwhile and contribute to my research. In fact your contributions are vital for the success of my research. This website is part of my PhD project and it took a lot of work, energy, and frustration to get it to the stage where it is now, however, I am still enjoying it ;-). I started my PhD early 2008 and like most PhD students, spend the first year on diving into the literature, thinking about what you really what to do in your research, how you can do it, then writing everything up (10.000 words!), applying for ethical clearance, and finally presenting your proposed project within the university. Once you ticked all the boxes and the university approves your project, you can start the real fun.

As I planned to do my research mainly Internet-based on my own research website, I started looking at different software options in order to set up this website. As I wanted to do as much as possible myself without spending too much money, I decided to use an open-source platform. Open-source software is basically free (no license fee) and because the code is open to every developer, a wide range of functionality and updates are constantly available. By the way, open-source is not just for small budgets or small projects, even big organizations or governments are using open-source software. Guess they want to be independent of big software companies.

After some trial and error, I ended up using the Drupal platform, which provided lot of community functionalities. Although I wanted to do as much as possible myself, I realized that setting up my research platform and working on all the other PhD tasks was not going to work. I do have a background in IT, however, would not describe myself as a programmer and decided to get some help with modifying the templates based on the layout (hope you like it) I developed. Once the website was up and running, I started adding and structuring content, modifying the modules functionalities, and testing, testing, testing. Well, don’t want to go into too much technical detail, but if you want to know more, just drop me a line.