The Name

In 1994 I was in a seventh grade “life science” class with my next-door neighbor, Wes Begoon.  We were learning about Linaeus’ binomial nomenclature system and I began calling Wes Idius Begoonus as a joke.  The word “idius” was supposed to resemble “idiot”.  Wes then began calling me Idius Sticklius. Eventually, after enough repetition, Idius became my nickname.  Wes and I rode the same school bus.  For the next few years,  several of the younger people on the bus only knew me as Idius–they never knew my real name.  That was rather amusing to me.  The nickname lasted until 1999 when I graduated from high school.

Once I graduated, I began using “idius” as my login name for online accounts.  When I set up the first version of this website, it was in a directory called “idius” on a GTE server because idius was my GTE user name.  The Land! part was added a few years later once the website became rather large.  The exclamation mark was inspired by Yahoo! and AMD 3D Now! technology.

Structure

Idius.net site is composed of three major pieces:

Idius Land! is a WordPress installation which provides the main structure of the website.

Across the Universe is my personal web log.  The comment system, plugins, theme, and search systems are separate from the Idius Land! WordPress installation.

Photo Gallery is a Coppermine photo gallery system organized into a set of albums.  It is used to make large photos easily browsable.  Both Idius Land! and Across the Universe pull photos from the Photo Gallery.

History

In December of 1999 I was a freshman physics major at James Madison University.  I apparently didn’t have enough to occupy my time, so I started learning HTML and playing around with web design.  I had a few megabytes of space on my ISP server (GTE) and I learned how to access it to publish web pages.  Back in 1999 it wasn’t nearly as easy as it is today.  The first page I posted consisted of a single picture of the drawing below (yes I know that the shadows are inconsistent).

with the text “Empty Cemetery”. I soon expanded the site, bought the domain name idius.net, and adopted the name Idius Land! Here’s a rough version of what the site looked like in September 2001, shortly after the famous terrorist attacks, here (courtesy of Archive.org).  In January of 2003 the front page became this little puddle / splash on a Cartesian grid with rollovers galore.  Click to see it in action:

I stopped updating the page in 2004 because creating updates was time-consuming and Thefacebook.com emerged as a pretty good alternative.  Thefacebook.com eventually became simply Facebook and it grew in popularity.  I was busy teaching high school and working on my master’s degree, so I didn’t do anything with Idius Land! until June of 2009 when I finished the first year of my PhD program at UC Riverside.  Now everything is managed with WordPress, so it’s easy to update and the site is much more convenient for sharing information with everyone. Facebook is restrictive.

For more details on the history, you can plug idius.net into the Wayback Machine.