In 2004, I began studying for a degree at Queen Mary, University of London. Like most people, I found the jump from A-levels to degree level quite tough and during this time I was always on the lookout for ways to get involved with my peers to ease the transition. There were plenty of academic activities to join, such as PASS, and many of the faculty members were always approachable and available for a chat should one require it. However, I still felt that there could be more - a way to bring groups of friends together to chat about both academia and their social lives, maybe even play games, so I got to work on building Mathsnotes.com.

Click to enlarge This was the very first version of Mathsnote.com

Mathsnotes.com

Mathsnotes was a very basic, HTML site with no content management system (CMS) - obviously doomed from day one. I didn't have the required knowledge to create anything dynamic, so all the content was added manually, and I picked up some tutorials from the internet to create DHTML effects - tacky ones at that! The site was very plain, and uninteresting. It will come as no surprise to discover that after 2 months of adding content manually, I gave up on this project.

So what happened next in The Maths Site's story? Not much. Not much for quite a while. Eventually, when exam season finished, I went along to see Professor Tavakol to discuss Mathsnotes and find out his views. He was very encouraging about the idea and provided me with enough motivation to try again. So one cool summer's morning, working at a Chelmsford's finest car park at 5am, there I was reading a great book on creating dynamic websites. After a few days I had come up with something at least a million times better than the original.

Click to enlarge A more dynamic Mathsnotes V2

Mathsnotes.com V2

As you can see, or some of you may even remember, this version of the site was less boring to look at, and was very pleasant to add content to. It had a fully-fledged CMS and even allowed people to sign up and have their own profile there. Other additions to the site included downloads - things like courseworks, past exam papers etc; Games - only one game actually, 'The Integral Substitution Game' which really helped me in Calculus 2!; Course Specific Quizzes - This contained a 'Maple Terminology Quiz', the idea of quizzes was to get users completing for points, but I never got round to it. There was also a 'Shoutout' board where anyone could leave a message on the site. It all seemed wonderful, except for one thing - the forum.

The forum was not actually part of the site, and loaded in a popup. It didn't even look like the rest of the site, even the member database wasn't linked in to it, so you'd have to sign up twice - definitely not ideal. This, with a severe lack of funding, ultimately led to Mathsnotes' demise. Shortly before the hosting contract expired, JSC Solutions contacted me with a sponsorship offer which gave me the funding and motivation to create an even better, forum-embedded website, and that was christened...

Click to enlarge The first version of The Maths Site.

The Maths Site

So in April 2005 I unveiled the new website, with the help of Professor Cameron and Mr Bill White, providing both support and promotion (indeed many of you may have found us from QMUL's linking page) for which I am truely grateful. Also I must thank Mr Mark J. Nielsen for giving me some puzzles to use here. This new site had its very own basic forum that I created to work with the existing member database. I also did-away with some of the features of Mathsnotes, the change in title may even give away what was ditched - the notes. It seemed silly to be copying up lecture notes on the site (and also may spark some copyright issues). A better approach seemed to be to let users ask questions on the forum, and then in turn, another user would answer them. This also meant that the site would now fully function with me looking after it every day!

The rest, as they say, 'is history'. There were some design changes, and a few things removed or added over time, but ultimately it's the same Maths Site you always knew and loved, with a great community of lecturers and students who really did make this site what is today.

More as it happens