Jan 03, 2003 :: The Gayathri Moment
After two years of publishing GoodNewsIndia I became aware of the huge need to gather more of the India good news than the site had thus far done. GNI is publishing about two feature stories in its magazine section but what seemed needed was a series of supplementary sections to host the many facets of a ‘good India.’ The result is already on view, but here for the record I think I will lay out something of the flavour of the work done. A sort of ‘movie about the movie’. The following may be technical and personal but this being a ‘diary’, I feel all of that belongs here. So here goes.
With the zeal of a convert I am --after four years of working with it-- a passionate Apple Macintosh man. I do the entire GNI work from a 300mHz Apple PowerBook portable that goes with me between my city place --for the Internet connection-- and my country place-- for the quiet. And just when I was settling in my Mac OS9 heaven --to which of course entry is barred for Windows-users :))—along came Mac OSX. Apparently even heaven can get better if Apple can do anything about it. So I upgraded as that seemed the first requirement to run a about-to-get-big-GNI. I am convinced now when a computer approaches perfection its operating system will be Unix-based and the interface will be Mac’s. Mac OSX is already there and Microsoft will probably get there in about ten years. Sorry about that, most of you Windows people!
It’s an all-Mac cast that now brings you GoodNewsIndia and I am delighted to introduce them so they may take a bow. The OS is Unix based rock-like Mac OS ver.10.2 also known as Jaguar. The entire text editing and html hard-coding is done on the peerless BBEdit. Images are ‘managed’ on Graphic Converter --another Mac native-- and edited in Photoshop Elements. FTP client is the charming Mac original, Fetch. So life *is* possible without Windows.
The next search was for a Content Management System [CMS] that would be flexible and easy for a one-man-op to maintain. I tried several CMS and ‘blog’-type tools. There is an amazing variety out there. I almost settled for MovableType and just before committing to it, discovered pMachine: and that made all the difference. After playing with it for close to 4 weeks I paid for a pro-version. It’s that good. There’s a free version too, from here. [Sorry to belabour the theme but Rick Ellis developed pMachine entirely on a Mac.]
Now I found I needed to run a MySQL database and have PHP enabled at the site. And more than that I needed to ‘learn’ these new things. So there was two-weeks of learning enough of these to get by. In all this time what stood by me was my web-host, LinkSky.They set these up for me at no additional cost to the $4.95 per month that I pay. I have raved enough about this low cost service elsewhere- and not only because GNI gets a commission if you patronised their service.
So all the bits and pieces were in place for GNI to step into another dimension and still be managed by one man. All that was left was to get the content going. But that’s a different --and ongoing-- story!
Then there was the search for a piece of software for a search-facility. It is moving to see so many dedicated souls creating fine pieces of software and giving them away free. In this commerce-ridden world that is good story nobody seems to be noticing. Between say Linux, Apache, MySQL, PERL, PHP --all free-- one can today put together an industrial strength web site. I finally settled on DGS Search to provide the search feature at GNI.
Finally, you must pardon me this rather personal concluding note: Throughout the four months given to this re-work, I was a happy --if hard-worked-- man moving towards a Jan 3,2003 launch. Then on Jan 2, Gayatri died suddenly. She was beautiful, young, innocent and wanted so much to live. She had worked hard as a school-teacher and had walked into the hearts of her students. For me, --a loner-- she was a dear niece who was proud of my work with GoodNewsIndia. Then suddenly as I said, a day before launch date, she died. In trying to cope with her loss, I in my despair make you all consider her for a moment here. There seems little else I can do. I dedicate this reborn site of positive news to that dear child so unfairly wiped away without a trace.