Another Milestone: Ye Olde Blogge, Relaunched!

It is late, a lovely warm summer night in the middle of nowhere, the countryside outside of Berlin where and I enjoy one of our traditional Hacker Sessions combining the solitude necessary for creative software development work with congenial, mutual smoking, joking, encouragement or slacking.

I'm putting the finishing touches on my newly designed web site (the one you are reading right now). I have evolved a more balanced, less "dada punk"-style design, more timeless, less confrontational. Am I getting older? (Rhetorical questions, I dig dem!) Anyway, the new design and the new site, both of which took way longer than allotted (but I have grown used to that undesirable-but-unavoidable side-effect of actually-making-or-doing-things), celebrate both the progress I have been making over the last few weeks while developing, optimizing and refining the core of MetaLeap, as well as my continously reinforced confidence in what I set out to do. Furthermore, my previous website design had a very real potential to actively scare off potential prospective consulting clients, quite unnecessarily.

The website you are looking at is actually a homegrown weblog, running on a very fragile, early MetaLeap prototype (that is to say, this site/blog hybrid runs on Lisp), with only the most rudimentary support of RSS and comments and no WYSIWYG facilities whatsoever — for now.

I have not really written much about MetaLeap as a platform. There will be more than enough time to go into details as the system evolves. At the very core the platform is based on two distinct systems:

• the App Server hosts your logic and definitions: metadata ('article', 'comment', 'link', 'category'), workflows ('comment notification'), and lists of all these items. It currently has none, and will have a pre-defined, non-customizable (but, of course, outstanding) web-based user interface.
• the Site Server lets you build branded sites and pages mixing your own static and/or dynamic web content (legacy or not) with live data and artifacts provided by the App Server.

I am currently blanking out approximately 736 or so important details here. I am developing MetaLeap and both its App Server and Site Server components as we speak. The next milestones: a marketable, enjoyable, usable and dog-feedable Personal Information Manager / Email Client system running on App Server, and some much improved Internet, Intranet and Extranet web sites running on Site Server.