: What's the 'best' way to publish a written paper to your personal website? I have a personal website, for things like posting my work from undergrad and grad school (I'm a recent grad student).

@Connie744

Why not let your users decide which is more friendly between two or three options? Personally I have some papers written in LaTeX and available for download as PDF and others written directly in HTML, but if you're worried about PDF being user-unfriendly you can easily make the documents available as PDF and as a link to a Google Docs file based on either the PDF or the Word document.

Word and Pages are horrible formats for download.

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@Angie530

First, what is the purpose of posting your papers?
If you simply want them to be available, then for right now just use whatever's easiest, like uploading the .doc files, ideally with an in-page abstract so people know what they're getting. You can always go back and change this later. This will get you a site as soon as possible, with minimum effort if that's what you need. Google is capable of indexing the content of many filetypes, so things should still be findable eventually, though it could be more convenient. (I have no idea if it will index .pages files, though; note that document only refers to the "most common" they handle and shouldn't be assumed to be a complete list.)

If you want your papers to actually become part of the web, then ideally you'd put in the effort to do the HTML formatting and whatnot, even if auto-converted, as they're more directly indexable and maybe even more importantly, linkable that way. (And again: you can always go back and tweak later.) It also affords you the advantage of you linking out to any other papers you might be referencing, directly in the context of your paper with a hyperlink, when possible, rather than as just a bibliography item.

A few other bits:


People editing or plagiarizing your stuff is a risk with pretty much any of the options; get over it. The only way to eliminate the risk of plagiarism it to not publish.
PDFs aren't much more separate from your site than Word or Pages files. On the other hand, visitors are probably more likely to have a PDF viewer(eg. Adobe Reader) than Word or even worse, Pages.
Difficulty of editing once posted as HTML: ask yourself honestly how often a paper really gets modified once published. It's probably going to come up very little if at all; you can probably just disregard this.
If saving space by uploading to Google Docs is a serious consideration, that problem is probably better solved by getting more storage on your hosting account than introducing an entire third-party service to the workflow just to house your documents. If there are more reasons to use Google Docs, fine; otherwise, you're just complicating things.

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