... but where is the News???

So our site is  now online and the first thing folks said is that the layout is nice, good to see a more upto date format.. but.. but.. where is the news? what happened to it? will it be back?

The short answer - we are still working on it.. the long answer??? ... Read on.

The previous 'News Headlines' section was a custom coded php application that had an admin section and a contributor section. We had a team of totally dedicated contributors - Ankit Desai, Shishir M, J Tull, Jai S to name a few who would work the system every day to search and enter the headlines manually.  The contributors also worked as editors and they were able to weed out the bad quality sites and articles and present the stuff that is of most interest to the users.

Over the years, the team entered over 21964 of these links into our database.. these are now archived at this link.  But all this was a tedious job that required total commitment from the volunteers. Unlike the website administrators who can decide to take a hiatus and work on their pet projects/books, this option was not available for the news contributors.

The intention to give time off for the news contributors and give them more meaningful work, and the need to stabilise on supported stable software necessiated the retiring of the old news links systems.

The intention is to replace the news system with an automatic news aggregator. That would however mean that the quality control previously present would not be there, and there could be duplication of same articles from multiple sources. However such a system when implemented is a small price compared to the grand scheme of things.

So please do keep tuned in for the news section updates. We are working on identifying the new source and system.  

And I would like to take a moment to thank the  Volunteers who helped out all these years - Ankit Desai, Shishir M, J Tull,  and Jai S. Ankit requires special mention as he singlehandedly kept the system updated over the past two to three years and it is no small task in any measure.

Here is hoping we will have a better system in place soon ....