About this site

Licenses

Except where explicitly noted, everything on this site is mine and copyright me. You do NOT need to ask before linking to this site, but please DO ask before copying/mirroring my work or hotlinking my images.

This includes code. Code released for public use is marked as such.

History of Things Of Interest

geocities.com era

My first website went up in July 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.

ned.ucam.org 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.org 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 from Blue Linux (http://bluelinux.co.uk), bought a domain name, set up redirects and the new (current) site went live.

I chose the name "Things Of Interest" because that is basically what my site is all about. The domain name I chose, 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.

Blue Linux was bought by Mythic Beasts in 2010.

The current site design

The design is entirely my own work. The content management system was written from scratch in PHP when I found nothing already available which satisfied my needs. I am not much of a graphic designer, as you can see. I have tried to obey my own design recommendations.

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 rendering issues in compliant browsers. The site conforms to XHTML 1.0 Strict.

Please let me know if you find a markup error, technical or aesthetic issue.