Sometime in the late 90's I, as did many others, got tired of updating my content on my website manually. I had done some perl development with my first tech job and was a huge fan of /.^slashdot. As a result, I decided to contribute a little code to their backend in return for having my own copy of the code to serve up my websites (early a.o, and wtlug.org). This lasted for all of two weeks until I decided that slashcode was a huge hack and not worth the hassle. Luckily for everyone, it has come around and is now a very viable CMS for running high-volume websites.

I stumbled across a package called MyNews on Freshmeat. It was written in a language I didn't know yet, and had barely heard of: PHP. It was written by a fellow from Norway named Stig. Stig got what he needed out of it, and pretty much left it at that. I downloaded, installed, and began hacking away daily to beef it up for my needs. Eventually, I contacted Stig and asked him if I could release a new version of it with all of my changes. He agreed, and I became the maintainer of MyNews-1.0. Over the years, as I saw new functionality show up on the web, I did what I could to incorporate those new technologies into MyNews.

After many point releases and complete re-writes, my budding family and deeper focus on my career began to take focus. My plan was to keep slowly contributing to the project, as time permitted, and release MyNews-5 for public consumption when it was ready. I announced, and made available, a few *pre-release* builds and was happy with the stability and functionality of the new code. A few sites ^[1][2] were running it and seemed to be happily plugging along. Unfortunately, a job change and impending addition to the family prevented me from fixing the few bugs that were left and releasing the Gold (read: final) version of MyNews-5.

Unfortunately, with the slow development cycle, I have not been able to keep up with many of the new features/technologies available in many of the major CMS available these days. Sadly, if released, MyNews-5 would still be light-years behind many of the other offerings ^[1][2]. Therefore, I have decided to discontinue development of MyNews. I have removed the main website and directed all content to this article.

If you are interested in taking over the project, please contact me and I will do every thing I can to transition it. I would love to see MyNews become what I always wanted to see. Unfortunately, I just don't have time to do it myself.

I have officially migrated my site over to Drupal-5. I have written a migration script for personal use to convert data in the MyNews database to Drupal's DB schema. If you are interested, I will provide you with a copy of this script.

--Mike

Well, I am coming to you once again with a pretty pointless rant, but hey isn't that what we are here for? Okay, I have a couple of issues I would like to touch on here, so bare with me. I know some of you will understand and for those of you that don't, oh..well... listen to me anyway dammit! Read on for the scoop. I figure the title is very fitting for the issues I would like to rant on, so here goes.

Charlie Brown...how dear to me he is. I feel as though I know him. Very often, I feel as though I am him. While I know that's not quite true, Charlie Brown was in fact Charles Schulz, but he was much more than that. He was the anti-hero for all young American boys. None of us has been picked first for every team, nor have we always been brimming with the confidence to approach our own "red-headed girls", but thanks to Charlie, we knew we werent alone. Thanks, Charlie, thank you from the bottom of my heart.