And we are back!!

New look, new features and a new spirit... yes we are back for good!

Purdafash has been revamped for a new season of participatory news making. Now citizens and journalists come together to create a social news network and build campaigns surrounding issues of core public interest. The new PHP version of Purdafash (the previous being Ruby on Rails) monetizes on drawing the skills of both the skilled and unskilled at news collection and dissemination.

The redesign was achieved through a process of continuous selection and negotiation of available technology. It has been long nights for the technical team. What looked amazing in initial mock ups was not particularly good when coded into HTML. Even our playing with color gradients did not help much, so we were back to the drawing board for a new design. Finally what came out was similar to what you see today at Purdafash. Ofcourse, there shall always be an attempt to grow and improve on all fronts.

Another realization was that just allowing users to upload their stories/problems was of no consequence unless the people came together to rally around those problems and help out each other. This made us put on our thinking hats and we decided to come up with a feature called ‘Campaigns’ which allows people to share a common platform on any issue highlighted by a particular news and interact in a much closer and faster manner.
We are keeping a list of all the feedback you are giving us and we will try to incorporate most of them whenever we work on a newer version. After all Purdafash is your website.

Personally, it has been an amazing experience and a steep learning curve to be on our own. There has been words of encouragement as well as sniggers of doubters, but we are still on the path that we chose for ourselves. From being covered in Mint and Deccan Herald to being recently featured on NDTV India... The ride has been really exciting and we are still going strong. I guess that is what matters finally.

Today I believe it when I quote Enrique:
"Ose le meilleur....Et lève-toi sans avoir peur"
(Dare the best and lift yourself without fear)

Thus we are back.. and we are back to stay!!

- Siddhartha Banerjee
CTO, Purdafash Dot Com