About This Site | Dr. John Woodruff

Everything here is intellectual property; don’t get hung up on the idea of copyright which is merely a subset of intellectual property. Fair use is fair use, but (mis)appropriate my IP and I’ll see you in court. If you’re unsure, email me for clearance. That said …

This website is an outgrowth of various web endeavors going back to the late 1990s. To say that HTML has evolved in that interval is the extreme of nderstatements. The present WordPress iteration officially commenced October 2018 as a platform update to maintain standards and accessibility compliance. It sustains the public-facing static content from 2003-2006 and 2010–2015. With this new platform, an exponentially increasing degree of content is being added.

Although arguably unrealistic to Internet content, all pertinent available rights are reserved. In general, copyright only applies to forms of expression of an idea—not to the idea itself. Anyone may make fair use of the content of this site provided appropriate citation is given in published works or academic papers.

This site has precise css print styling that dramatically improves the quality of paper and PDF memorialization. Since these “brandings” will not appear on paper, it is requested that the URL header or footer inserted by a browser at the time of printing be left intact if content is to be (re)distributed in paper, PDF, XPS, or image format.

Material concerning Popol Vuh is inherently proprietary and proper attribution should be made if used by or for third-party research.

FormMail++ is available according to the licensing terms stated in the file distribution.

Advertising…Really?

Chairman Mao Zedong once said, 古为今用洋为中用, “use the past to serve the present, the foreign to serve the domestic.” I wonder if the same is true for my relationship with Google.

It was never my intention to seek out advertising revenue when I enrolled in Google’s Adsense. Frankly, my hosting costs are not that substantial. But while reviewing 4xx errors in my server logs, I saw that Google repeatedly requested “ads.txt” (which did not exist). It didn’t make much sense at first, but then I thought: Does this mean that Google sees some value in my site? Google Search Console showed a steadily improving pagerank, but seldom had I appeared on first-page search results (which for most users contains only ten results). So then it occurred to me: why not use the present to serve the future, why not co-opt Google to serve me?

What I mean to say by this is, all things being equal, wouldn’t Google be more likely to privilege a site that displays Google’s ads over a site that does not offer Google any revenue?

So I now feature Google ads on my site. It is selling up, not selling out. I am certainly open to hearing anyone’s thoughts on it, and I’m DEFINITELY happy for click-throughs from as many different IP addresses as I can get. I intuitively suspect that advertisement click-throughs probably affect pagerank even more than search click-throughs.

Anyway, these are my reasons for introducing advertising. Please receive my broad invitation to light my site on fire—especially—so as to use Google for Everyman‘s benefit.

Profile

John Woodruff is an Alt-Ac colonialist scholar, irregular adjunct professor, digital humanities practitioner, and contract linguist. He holds a Ph.D. in Romance Languages, an M.A. in Spanish/Latin-American Studies, and a distinctive B.A.U.H. in Spanish/Mathematics. Dr. Woodruff is one of the world's foremost experts—and one of only two colonialists—on the periconquest Maya narrative known as Popol Vuh.

Dr. Woodruff's interdisciplinary scholarship examines the oldest-surviving Popol Vuh manuscript through the theoretical lenses of paratext, marginalia, and rhetoric. He is the only scholar to apply contemporary marginalia theory to Popol Vuh and his post-doctoral research examined marginal annotations and modal shifts to expose an unacknowledged authorial entity within the first folio recto. Other areas of interest and study include Maya anthropology, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Generation of 1927 poets and dramatists. More recently, Dr. Woodruff has taken an interest in gender law and policy.

In the classroom, Dr. Woodruff's teaching philosophy infuses self-concordance theory developed by Tal Ben-Shahar at Harvard University which further informs Woodruff's views on faculty-student collaboration.

Outside of the ivied halls of academia, Dr. Woodruff offers expert simultaneous and consecutive oral interpretation as well as document translation for medicine, civil law, business, and non-profit. He is available for guest lectures on Maya civilization, discovery/exploration of the Americas (1492–1524), and colonial Spanish-America (1542–1800).

In addition to his formal academic inquiry and practice, Dr. Woodruff has considerable technical expertise having created various workflow utilities, most notably Excellent Grades and FormMail++.