If you are visiting this website [1] regularly, you may have noticed the new stylesheet. If you wonder, it was largely inspired by the user interface found on the Nokia N9 smartphone [2]; I hope you will like it.

But really, the most important change on the website is not about how it looks: the entire code base has been rewritten, more or less from scratch; as before, its source code is also hosted here, as the DaPortal project [3]. Unfortunately, the rewrite was conducted using the PHP programming language again [4], for lack of time learning a new language in the process. It is therefore not expected to be the last rewrite of DaPortal unfortunately.

On the positive side, the code base is much cleaner than before; its different rendering engines will be worth a separate article later. It was a significant effort nonetheless, with a lot of code to port or rewrite: it took three months to pin a satisfying architecture, three more for a functional prototype, and a total of nine months of after-hour work to complete the migration.

This partly explains the lack of news published here in the meantime - so there will be lots coming now!

[1] http://www.defora.org/
[2] http://swipe.nokia.com/
[3] http://www.defora.org/os/project/12/DaPortal
[4] http://www.php.net/