by Erick Engelke
October 6, 2025
A few years ago I wrote what would become known as OnlineProfileBuilder or OPB, a tool for creating standardized faculty web profiles.
OPB is already pervasive in Engineering and Science, and is becoming the standard solution for web profiles on campus across all faculties for 2025.
OPB is very rigid in what it accepts and what, in turn, it generates. It does an excellent job of organizing people’s data into a well-designed, consistent structures in a manner Google will digest and many web viewers will appreciate. But it does very little to handle free expression.
OnlineScholar balances that freedom, it is designed for so called vanity web pages such as personal or professional pages, blogs, etc. It allows the page author to freely express their own ideas and vision.
The intended audience is any interested faculty or staff member. Here at the University of Waterloo, any of them are free to create their own pages at Online Scholar as they wish, just visit here to get started.
The addition of Math symbols makes it particularly useful for STEM individuals who would often struggle with other tools in order to generate typical equations. Instead, OnlineScholar allows one to use the familiar TeX formatting strategies.
There are two popular standard for marking up pages for the web, specifically, they are MarkDown and ASCIIdoc. I chose the latter because it’s more standardized (one standard compared to many variants) and generally more powerful, particularly with respect to tables.
Most of your ASCIIdoc questions can be answered by using google search
In the current age, we must all be mindful to make our web content accessible to those with special needs or requiring assistive technologies. It’s not just good intentions, it’s good business and it’s the law.
When our university members use many popular HTML content creation tools like Word or others the results are typically not ideal from a web perspective. Worse yet, PDFs.
In contrast, OnlineScholar generates pure clean HTML and uses CSS markup to alter the display, and it encourages use of alt (comment) tags for images.
For Math markup, it uses MathJax which generatees both SVG and MathML, the latter being accessible.
This devotion to simplicity allows all pages to be very accessible for those with special needs or assistive technologies.
For example, reading any page with Goole’s free built-in page to speech tools will produce spoken pages which make sense.
The system implements modern SEO optimizations including robots.txt and sitemap.xml files, and generates logically laid out content, all making your pages searchable with Google. Usually they are indexed one day after they are published and linked from other pages.