Month: May 2010

Chyrp: All Good Things Come to End

UPDATE: Chyrp has been revived, and version 2.1 has been released.

Chyrp is a blogging engine designed to be very lightweight while retaining functionality. It is powered by PHP and has very powerful theme and extension engines, so you can personalize it however you want.

This is what was used to be contained in the official website of Chyrp, before it actually became unavailable.

Chyrp basically is a lightweight tumblelogging engine based on PHP and MySql. It’s a tumblelogging just like Tumblr that you can install in your own server. It’s lightweight in the sense that basically the essential or core functions are installed out of the box, to minimize use of server resources and space. I used to install it in some of my projects just to post short snippets of text, photos, audios, videos, quotes and links.

However, just two days ago, the main developer, Alex Suraci, in the Chyrp blog, posted an out of ordinary news: Chyrp is Dead; Long Live Chyrp.

As you may have noticed, progress on Chyrp has grinded to a halt, and has been in that state for a long while now. It is no longer maintained. A few people have volunteered to step in, which I appreciate, but no progress has been made. Throughout this project’s timeline I can count the repeated contributors on one hand (whom I am eternally grateful for; Twig, a lot of internal refactoring, and many fixes are the result of their hard work). It’s unhealthy for a project to rely too much on one maintainer; when they lose interest the whole thing crumbles down. This is essentially what’s happened. People keep switching to, finding, or using Chyrp, which just isn’t a good idea for me to encourage given Chyrp’s current state. So now I’m announcing it’s death.

Chyrp will always be available at GitHub. Any contributors can feel free to fork my repository; I’d be more than happy to accept patches and security fixes, or add you as a committer if you seem trustworthy and active enough. But I will no longer be working on this project, I probably won’t be in the IRC channel anymore, and I can no longer guarantee that this site will stick around through server moves and such. Unless a miracle happens and Chyrp development springs from the grave (which will be judged by actions, not words).

Chyrp has been a part of my life since I first learned to program. It grew out of what is now a “hello world”: writing a blog engine. It has spanned a decent chunk of my critically-thinking life. Thanks for being a part of this project, whether you were a user or a contributor.

We, the users of this great web application (other than WordPress, of course), are saddened by this news. We would have rather see Chyrp through till the end than witness its untimely demise. What happens now to my current projects that use Chyrp? Well, maybe I’ll just continue with the latest version and pray that it is not hacked.

UPDATE: Chyrp has been revived, and version 2.1 has been released.

The Things We Learned from the Recent Election

The day after the election, almost all results are in. The things we learned so far:

  • We should trust the survey results, the survey companies, and their supposed ‘scientific’ approach. Or at least have them under consideration;
  • Endorsement by INC is not a guarantee of victory;
  • You don’t have to join public debates in order to win a senatorial seat.

But most of all, now that election is over, its a relief watching TV once again without the false claims and promises from the various candidates.