Things Of Interest is the personal website of me, Sam Hughes. It is (almost) a representative cross-section of my interests, obsessions and psyche. Everything I have ever done which isn't either
- unfinished
- unavailable in any sort of electronic format, or
- too shameful to ever see the light of day
is available on here somewhere. Depth of content varies immensely depending on how much enthusiasm I had for writing at the time. I rarely throw stuff away: much of it is very old, some is out of date.
There is no recommended browser, window size, colour depth or anything for viewing this site. It should render well in anything down to and including text-to-speech interpreters. I do however unreservedly endorse Mozilla Firefox for general internet browsing.
Except where noted, everything on this site is mine and copyright me. You do NOT need to ask before linking to me but please DO ask before copying/mirroring my work or hotlinking my images.
History of Things Of Interest
Geocities era
The first thing I ever put online was a page of Perfect Dark times so I could compete in the Perfect Dark Elite. That was in August 2001, and the site was hosted on GeoCities. Time passed and I added a mish-mash of various random stuff to the site - most of it is still here, but not much of it was particularly spectacular. At the time the site was called "SamSim's Site", if that even counts as a name.
ned era
In October 2004 I had come to two conclusions: firstly, I was sick of GeoCities, and secondly, my computer's hard drive was hopelessly cluttered with stuff - documents I'd kept - which weren't doing me any good, and weren't doing anybody else any good either. I got some free web space on ned.ucam.org, an internet server run by my college, and began the process of 1) shifting my entire GeoCities site over, reformatting it all according to a Master Template so the site actually looked good (for the first time ever) and 2) putting all the documents I could conceivably put online online, after formatting them too. As a result my site became a larger, more rigidly structured mess.
I couldn't think of a good name for my site offhand, so I put in "Sam's Archive" as a stopgap until I could think of something better. This turned out to take more than a year.
qntm era
In June 2005 I finished university. Eventually I knew I would have to move my site off ned.ucam.org and host it myself somewhere. My site had been growing linearly all this time so it was also becoming impractical to implement site-wide changes one page at a time as I had about 250 individual pages to maintain, so I wanted to design some sort of content management system to automate such changes. Also I wanted a domain name; also, I wanted to put ads on. I spent several months installing a server on my computer, learning PHP, and constructing a rough CMS of my own. In November 2005 I began converting all my content across to the new format, and in January 2006 I got hosting on BlueLinux.co.uk, bought a domain name, set up redirects and the new (current) site went live.
The site name I chose was "Things Of Interest" because that is basically what my site is all about. The domain name I chose, www.qntm.org, has nothing directly to do with this; I just wanted something as short as possible. It was decided upon after extensive discussions with friends of mine online. The suggestion of "qntm" originally came from Steve Bryze.
The current site design
The design is entirely my own work. I am not much of a graphic designer, as you can see. I have tried to obey my own design recommendations. If you have aesthetic or technical issues with the site then don't hesitate to contact me.
My intention from the start when I began designing this page was for the whole site to be entirely XHTML standards-compliant so it would have absolutely nothing in the way of browser rendering issues. Most of the site conforms to XHTML 1.0 Strict. Pages are run through the W3C Markup Validator after major changes are made, though please let me know if you locate a markup error.
Formatting is handled by a stylesheet, but the basic structure of the site still stands with no stylesheet. The layout is also liquid and should render properly at any text size.
This site is entirely hand-coded using Notepad. Page layouts are generated automatically using a customised content management system I programmed myself using PHP when I found nothing already available which satisfied my needs. Since the page-generating process is relatively lengthy, but the pages themselves are static, they aren't generated on the fly - instead I generate new or updated pages when they're needed and upload them manually.
