Prologue

Haiku News originally started out as The BeOSJournal (old site: www.beosjournal.com), under the leadership of Ryan Christiansen, a prolific writer with a penchant for coding in Rebol/CORE. There is a large amount of archived material that will one day make its way public again, most likely in a special Archived HTML section of our site, as back in the day, Ryan did not have the luxury of database-driven websites with php and mysql so readily available nowadays.

Yes, he coded his HTML by hand! *gasp* :)

Ryan was quick to report the news, almost hourly, of what happened back in the good old days of BeOS, and I would be remiss if I did not say how much work he did before I tried my hand at it. Thank you Ryan, from the bottom of my heart. I hope that I have done a worthy job in your eyes.

-Chris Simmons

2000

The BeOSJournal (BeOSJournal.com) began life in Februrary, 2000, as a BeOS centric link portal that aimed to also provide news not found anywhere else. One of the more interesting features of TBJ was the BeOS User Profiles that Ryan compiled by hand, from submissions by the community.

2001

Ryan found work with Microsoft and as such found himself with little time to post daily news, nor time for the necessary administration and research required to keep things running smoothly. Ryan started seeking out persons who would be willing to take over the site, as he no longer had the time to devote.

It was on BeShare that I replied to his inquiries and suggested my hand at running TBJ. Ryan cheerfully agreed, and I assured him that things would be ok. :) With the great help of Adam McNutt, another BeShare user, we registered the new domains www.beosjournal.org and www.beosjournal.net, and set about to "re-birth" The BeOSJournal.

During the last quarter of 2001 web hosting for the (then) primary domain (www.beosjournal.net) was provided by a business contact of Adams, who ran a small web hosting company on Macintosh hardware, using WebSTAR. Not as sophisticated and robust as Apache, but it served well enough for our needs at the time.

Some time passes...

2002

On February 28th, 2002, we return, after a brief hiatus dealing with domain issues, the web host, etc.

On March 26th, 2002, we switched to a new host, after being recommended by Jason VanDerMark (of TotallyBe) to contact Mike Weck at CompleXero about a free hosting offer for BeOS websites. We were naturally intrigued by the offer and contacted Mike who in just a few short days, took care of our hosting needs, including the use of a database for the coming backend.

In the summer of 2002 Daniel "daat" Teixeira joined our team, (his first post) and would stay for just over a year, boosting the general excitment level sky-high. ;) Daniel was a valuable asset to the site, posting almost daily whatever he found from around the community, which let me devote much needed time to the backend and news administration system I was working on. (now pretty far along).

Not only did Daniel post news, but he posted in our forum and hung out on BeShare quite a lot, always eager to chat about BeOS issues. Sadly, Daniel needed to leave us, and started his own news initiative in the form of IsComputerOn. (A great site name, btw.)

While we were sad to see him leave, we are glad too that he found his voice and the courage to start his own thing. Thanks Daat, it was fun having you aboard. :D

2003

Several small changes started to take place with the site, most notably a fresh new look from the strange green look I had originally thought up in the beginning. (what was I thinking?) Most of my time during the year was actually working on things the public would not directly see, like the administration system and underlying php codebase that separated the site into workable and well-defined modules. Features like our Archive, Search engine, and automatic pagination were only possible with using php and a database; quite a departure from hand-coding html.

Several events took place during the year that we were happy to report on, such as the Java Milestone, the CeBIT event in Hannover, Germany, the preview and review of Zeta, your questions answered by ex-Be Engineers, Microsoft settling with Be Inc. for a large sum of money, and more...

2004

Most definitely the year of the code... :)

So far, things are going well, and it looks to me like 2004 will be remembered as a very productive year for everyone involved. The new project name change, the WalterCon event, numerous developments, and a growing community of devoted new users have made this year seems special in my mind. Maybe its just me, but that is the way it feels.

During the first week of August, we moved servers, as Mike Weck informed us that he was departing from the webhosting business, unfortunately for us and the many people he generously offered webspace for. Our new home was graciously provided once again by long-time friend and confidant Adam McNutt, who also hosts several other BeOS-centric domains.

For the month of October Adam had some issues with his partner who ran the physical side of the hosting centre. Needless to say we took a timeout and moved hosts (yet again! whee). Thanks in large part to the kind folks at Hurricane Electric, we were able to get back online, and also thanks to an anonymous donator who helped pay for the first three months. From this point forward we aim to be able to handle the hosting costs from the advertising revenue we receive displaying Google AdWords.

Epilogue

Along the way in our journey to bring the news we have had submissions from various members of the community. Some people devoted their time to post a few stories, and some people only posted once. Despite these differences, the end result was the same. News for you, by fellow members of your community. I would like to thank the many people who have privately and publically helped us come into being. Without you, there would be no great community.

The story continues to practically write itself, adding surprising events chapter by chapter, written by the participants of our community, the people who still hold high the shared passion we have learned to recognize in our beloved OS. Pretty melodramatic, I will admit, but without words as strong as these, how best should I describe the feelings inside?

Sincerely,

-Chris Simmons,
Haiku News