Frequently Asked Questions

Here are the answers to (what I imagine would be) Frequently Asked Questions about the site. Feel free to email your questions here.

www.HarvardScholar.org (HarvardScholar) is a site that aims to capture a nontraditional student's unconventional journey through college. This happy, tiny slice of cyberspace is Niki Lanter's personal academic website and blog—a pet project, a hobby, a creative outlet.

HarvardScholar is hosted and powered by OpenScholar at Harvard. The full web address is https://scholar.harvard.edu/nlanter. Visit the Site Info page for a brief overview of the site, and read About the Author behind it.

Please read IMPORTANT NOTICE ABOUT HARVARDSCHOLAR below.

With the help of some pretty cool and user-friendly apps in OpenScholar, I was able to put together most of what you see here myself. This started out as a plain and simple web page, which slowly blossomed into the site you now so kindly visit. My background in web design and development makes tinkering with this site effortless and really quite enjoyable.

HarvardScholar continues to grow and evolve. I expect this place will go through a number of metamorphoses before I grow tired of it, and move on to the next hobby.

I started tinkering with web design and development back in the late 1990s, and did it professionally for several years. Although I had a background in CIS, I found coding in HTML and CSS much more rewarding than computer programming. I enjoyed it so much that there were nights when I dreamt in code. It's sort of like those times when one dreams of pivot tables and nested, conditional formulas in Excel... You know, like you do.

After experimenting with the various theme choices on OpenScholar, I settled on the "Bold" theme, similar to what the Harvard Initiative for Learning & Teaching (HILT) uses, but with some slight modifications to CSS to suit my personal preferences. This includes a different selection of fonts, and some minor adjustments to layout.

Images and photographs in the Galleries area, as well as the banner photo you see on each main section of the website, came mostly from my camera, phone, or scanner. Some pictures (especially those with me in them) were snapped by family, friends, or colleagues. In some cases, content submitted for cross-promotion will already include photos from the source. The stock photos I use on Events, Musings or News are purchased from www.123rf.com.

Probably. I'll be happy to help give your project or event some exposure and social media boost, if appropriate. You are welcome to submit your event details, press releases and accompanying images via email for review and consideration.

If time permits (semester breaks are a good time to check with me), I welcome the opportunity to do some light edits, or initial design and layout setup on other personal or project OpenScholar sites. I have tinkered enough with mine that I am open to a refreshing change. Email me to start a discussion.

"Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis" is a Latin maxim that means "All things change, and we change with them." It is one of the guiding principles in my life, which serves as a reminder that in order to move forward and grow, I must be flexible and willing to change.

That handsome dude is Murphy the Mutt, one of our dogs. He is a mix between a Labrador Retriever (or, perhaps, a Chesapeake Bay Retriever) and something else—possibly an American Staffordshire Terrier. We also have a Pug named Pagan, who occasionally terrorizes the big dog.

www.HarvardScholar.org