The old news and the new news

As the testing commences for the new "news" system, we took a look back at what was accomplished under the old News system software . We pulled some numbers and it was fascinating.

The first revelationw was that headlines stored in the database went all the way back to 2003!  Here is a list of yearwise headlines recorded

Year Headlines
2003 214
2004 521
2005 4184
2006 3005
2007 1751
2008 766
2009 1624
2010 1915
2011 2937
2012 2800
2013 842
2014 868
2015 411

The first two years the headline system was in a "Version 1" software written by Sachin PK. The software was rudimentary and its catalogueing and retreival of records was rather sparse.  you will note that the spurt of articles in 2005, which is when a version 2 of the news software was introduced,  and it was backed by a whole army of volunteers sifting through these headlines and entering them.  with the exception of 2008, the tempo was pretty much maintained. However the sheer amount of work would wear of many, in the end between 2013 till now, only one volunteer Ankit Desai was handling the News system. By the time the system was retired a couple of days ago, the total number of articles stood at 21,964.

The most prolific of the news entry system was JaiS, who contributed 6,820 of these articles. Ankit is in next place with 5141 and JTull with 3598.  JaiS ofcourse had moved on to become our Twitter Leader three years ago. 

Looking back, it is unbelievable that such a basic rudimentary software lasted more than ten years.  (Which is probably a 100 in Internet years).  Its one of those bittersweet moments - sad to see it go, yet happy to get rid of it! 

The new system that  is going to be replacing this is being inbuilt into the CMS of this site.  Currently testing and configuring is going on and we hope to unveil it in the next few days.