Afrigator Beta2.0 - Custom feature

As promised, here are the first overview and howto. It is on one of my personal favorites, customsing your home page.

Overview:
There are two major things you can do with this release as far as customisation goes. You can filter or blog post content on the home page, the blogs page and the podcasts page by country. You can select one or countries and content will be filtered accordingly. The cool thing is though that you can easily override your country filters by selecting a country from the drop down box in the sidebar.

The other feature is the Custom tab on the home page. You can set that up to only show relevant posts from the categories you select.

Both these features require that you only set it up once, and would be available and presented to you whenever you return to the site, so it is basically a once off setup pain you need to go through!

Howto:
1. Log in or if you are not yet a member, register. If you registered a long time ago, and have forgotten your password, click the “Lost your password?” and enter the email address you used to register with us to get a new password emailed to you.

2. If you successfully logged in, you will be taken to your Dashboard. On the dashboard menu is a link that says “Customise Homepage”. Click that thing.

3. The customise homepage page has 2 sections. The first section is for the country filters. All you need to do is scroll in the left block/pane and click on the country to add it to your preferences. It will save it and appear in the right hand side block/pane. To remove it from your preferences, click on it in the right hand side block/pane and it will disappear like magic…

4. The bottom section is where you choose categories to displayed on your Custom tab on the home page. To get everything, you need to simply leave it blank. To add a filter, click on a category in the left block/pane to add it to your preferences. It will save it and appear in the right hand side block/pane. To remove it from your preferences, click on it in the right hand side block/pane and it will disappear like magic… Again!

5. Go to the home page and checkit out, dudes! Even if you go away completely and only return the next day, you’d see the latest content as per your preferences.

So go check it out! Even if you don’t blog or don’t have an African blog, go register and enjoy it! Please let us know what you think and if it spits out weird looking code, notify us at bugs@afrigator.com, please!!!

6 Comments to "Afrigator Beta2.0 - Custom feature"

• Wanjiku Unlimited said: On 05/15/2008 at 7:47 am

  Been here Stii. I still have quite a bit to clear at the office but I’ll be right back soon as I’m done.

  Your blog is very beautifully done.

• Xbox » Blog Archive » Afrigator Beta2.0 - Custom feature said: On 05/15/2008 at 8:13 am

  [...] TechMixer | Review Online Services, Software , Web 2.0 information wrote an interesting post today on Afrigator Beta2.0 - Custom featureHere’s a quick excerpt As promised, here are the first overview and howto. It is on one of my personal favorites, customsing your home page. Overview: There are two major things you can do with this release as far as customisation goes. You can filter or blog post content on the home page, the blogs page and the podcasts page by country. You can select one or countries and content will be filtered accordingly. The cool thing is though that you can easily override your country filters by selecting a country from the [...]

• Charl van Niekerk said: On 05/15/2008 at 2:28 pm

  Slightly off-topic I know but I just thought of something. People can log in using OpenID when they go to the following URL:

  http://afrigator.com/login

  However, most people will try to log in using the box on the front page (as you also had in your screenshot). I know that space constraints will probably stop you from having an OpenID login box on the front page but what about having an “Log in using OpenID” link next to “Lost your password?”

• Charl van Niekerk said: On 05/15/2008 at 2:29 pm

  Just to clarify, what I meant by “having on the front page” would be displaying it by default, something like the lost password feature where the OpenID login box pops up would be ideal.

• Stii said: On 05/15/2008 at 4:21 pm

  @Charl I’ve removed the OpenID login temporarily. I’ve found a bunch of bugs in it and need to resolve it some stage before I put it back up. Will definitely do it as you suggested!

• stii.za.net » Blog Archive » Afrigator Beta2.0 - Content and usability said: On 05/16/2008 at 7:58 am

  [...] the front page, for example we have 4 tabs. You already know what the custom tab is about (if not, click here!), so I’m skipping that one. The other 3 tabs [...]

Spit it out!

Filed in: Afrigator by: Stii