It all began with the creation of the Sinhala document preparation system called SLaTeX. In 1993, soon after I joined the Ruhuna University, Sri Lanka, I started on that project which ended up in designing a transliteration scheme to write Sinhala language text using the English keyboard, a set of Sinhala fonts to be used with the famous TeX/LaTeX document preparation system and a set of utility programs that made it easier to complete the production of documents in Sinhala. The whole package was given the name SLaTeX.
I had an interest in using this new technology to gather and store information in Sinhala language. Collecting song lyrics had been one of my hobbies. Of course, everybody has a personal collection of favourite songs. So I thought, how about putting them all together on a web site? The result was the 'miyuru gii' project which was started some time in 1995 still at Ruhuna. To my knowledge this was the first ever online repository of Sinhala song lyrics. Many people contributed by bringing in songs and actually typing them. The Computer Science department still has a link to this collection of songs here.
Unfortunately, all activities of the 'miyuru gii' project seem to have died since I left Ruhuna in 2002. No new songs have been added. After many years, while digging into my past work, I came across the SLaTeX package again and the idea came back to my mind that I should again work on the songs - this time with improved web technology. So that's where I am today (May, 2008). For the past few months I have been spending hours and hours on building it all from scratch.
My hope is to maintain it myself for as long as I can and eventually to hand it over to someone (or a group of people) who would be really interested in it.