The Snyder News Network, an offbeat website of sports, humor, and politics with a focus on Mississippi, died Tuesday. It was 7.

The cause of death was impending time constraints, said Drew Snyder, its main writer. The site had been afflicted with creative malaise for the past couple of years.

Born in the summer of 1999, SNN was created with no clear purpose other than to allow its namesake an outlet to write. The website reached its peak of popularity in the Fall of 2000 during Ole Miss Homecoming elections and achieved a renaissance in the Spring of 2005 as it was recognized by liberal alternative weekly Jackson Free Press as “The Third Best Website in Jackson.”

SNN closed just a few months after the Summer of 1999 as its publisher began his first year of college at The University of Mississippi.

But in the spring of 2000, SNN would return, spurred on by Snyder’s quasi-interest in journalism and web design. And it was here where SNN would begin its rise to small-time notoriety. After several weeks of work to design the site, SNN was released to the general public. The logo was a blatant rip-off of CNN's logo, though the content was more reminiscent of The Onion than America’s first 24 Hour News Station.

SNN’s first headline story, “The Hit and Run Quarterback,” recounted the story of a college student who, while jogging, claimed to have been struck by a sports utility vehicle driven by Ole Miss starting quarterback Romaro Miller. Other stories included a local fraternity adopting John Deere as a corporate sponsor and columns from a curmudgeonly freshman named POS.

The POS Discussion Board (later named Monty's Message Board and The Rebel Yell), a message board from Boardhost, allowed anyone to leave comments about articles and anything else.

The timing was excellent. In an American society where 56K modems were still the most prevalent way to connect to the internet, college students were being introduced to T1 internet connections in their dormitories. They had fast computers, time on their hands, and a constant appetite for entertainment.

“In the pre-Friendster, pre-Facebook era, this was social networking on the internet in its crudest form,” Snyder said.

In the next few months, SNN would grow in popularity, reaching a peak in readership in the Fall of 2000 when approximately 1,000 readers a day were visiting the site to get the latest news on the hotly-contested Colonel Reb election and to choose among four male and four female college students from Ole Miss for SNN Man and Woman of the Week.

“They weren't tossing Pulitzers at me, but it was fun,” Snyder said. “This was before Google, at a time when it was novel and neat to be on the Internet, and at an age where people weren’t fearful that a crusty potential employer wouldn’t hire them if their picture was posted on the internet.”

SNN earned a “corporate sponsorship” of Sigma Nu Charity Bowl 2001 when several new initiates who didn’t sell the required $350 in ads chipped in to allow SNN to get corporate billing.

But following a summer in which SNN was dormant for nearly two months because of unreliable web hosting, the quality of the site and interest in the site continued to wan. By Spring 2002, SNN was dormant.

Then in the Spring 2004, Snyder decided to give SNN another go. Traveling to Europe the following week, Mr. Snyder restarted the site to update friends and families on his travels. A relatively new technology called Blogger enabled him to add new posts without time-consuming FTP. Greatly enjoying the new site as both a creative writing outlet and a way to stay connected to friends over great distances, he decided to continue it as he began law school in Charlottesville, Va.

This second generation SNN was a drastically different site. Mr. Snyder eliminated anonymous comments, scaled back the number of satirical articles, and rolled out a new, sleeker design.

When reflecting on the site, Snyder said the joys and successes of SNN can be attributed to the site’s readers, an assortment of ribald characters of varying writing ability who provided witty feedback and continued to visit the site even as SNN became plagued by sporadic posting and writer's block.

“Without all the great posters and readers, SNN wouldn’t have made it two weeks,” he said. “They were, for lack of a better word, the manna that fueled this very long run.”

All runs, however, have an endpoint, and earlier this year, Snyder announced that SNN’s finish line would be in late May.

With SNN now ending, Snyder remains unsure of its lasting legacy -- or his own.

"Alexander the Great conquered the known world. Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. 'Das Wunderkind' Alex Wright won the WCW Television Title. And me? I ran a relatively obscure website with maybe a few hundred readers that once got plagiarized by the sports editor of The Madison County Journal."

The Snyder News Network is survived by websites of several of its loyal readers, including The Clinton Administration, LittleBlog, WillBardwell.com, The Godfrey Show, VH1’s Best Week Ever Blog, The Just Dacket, and others.