News written by Petteri Pyyny (December, 2009)

Wow, I can't believe that the Noughties are about to end in couple of hours time. It is quite mind-boggling to think that our site, AfterDawn, has existed through this whole decade - and then some (as our regulars remember, we celebrated our site's 10th anniversary in June). I could write once again, my "traditional" New Year's summary of the past year's events, but I wont do that this time. Instead, just want to chitchat to you about this past decade.

First of all, 10 years ago, we already had a site, AfterDawn.com, that we began building in March, 1999 and that went eventually live on June, 1999. All of us, the founders of the site, were in our early twenties. I had just moved from Helsinki to New York, with my partner and our baby girl. I was witnessing the golden age of the "dotcom boom", working on one of the "dotcom darlings" of that era in Silicon Valley. It seemed that anything you'd create on the Internet would turn into gold, eventually. You could understand easily how we had the energy to first go through a normal working day in our "real life jobs" and then spend 6-8 hours in the evening to write news articles, code, design and plan for AfterDawn's future.

About a year ago we asked you guys to help us to translate our site to your own language. The whole translation process has evolved quite a lot during the past year and several new translation projects are currently on-going. However, two language versions are approaching the point where they could go finally go live.

Now, if you happen to speak a fluent speaker of either Spanish or Dutch and also understand English (well enough to be able to translate from English to your own language) -- and want to see AfterDawn available in your own language, contact us using our feedback form. We unfortunately can't pay for your efforts, but can send various AfterDawn merchandise to the most active volunteers as a thank you (and can write you a letter telling that you've helped with this project, if you want one).

The workload that there is left is relatively small -- just by spending couple of hours on it would help us dramatically to get these translations launched.

Help us out here :-)

P.S. We welcome other translation volunteers too -- we have on-going translation projects currently in Norwegian, Danish, German, (Brazilian) Portuguese and French. Just contact us if you'd like to participate. Read more...