So, by the looks of things we’ve (Afrigator) been somewhat, sort of “copied“. Honestly, I don’t mind it as much. In fact, I feel quite flattered! That’s to say if the Regator crew even knew of our existence. Lets be honest, a gator is what a gator does. Not sure, but it would be somewhat stupid to put a failwhale as a mascot when the word gator appears in the domain name.
The color scheme, well, gators live in swamps and swamps aren’t blue! Unless I’m completely color blind, that green looks nothing like our green. Just to prove the point here are our greens in good ol’ hex: #CDE855 #A7C520 and here are Regator’s: #95C564 #336324 The numbers are way off if you ask me!
Good for them that they’ve drummed up all three of the holy tech trinity to review them! (ReadWriteWeb, Techcrunch and Mashable) In all honesty, I’m a tad jealous of that… Then again, you have to keep in mind that they’re launching into the wild while we’re an African service. We all know that Africa is seen as the “Dark Continent” and often get overlooked by our bigger counterparts on a regular basis. Kudo’s to RRW / Marshall Kirkpatrick who not only did a piece on us, but also (if you can remember) acted as a judge at this year’s SA Blog Awards! We love ya RRW!!! (I’m an XL, should you feel like sending me a tshirt…)
As far as concept goes, I see it as totally different. Regator is more of a 9rules Network style service while Afrigator is a kind of Technorati like service, only more location based with a couple more bells and whistles. Vast difference there.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m NOT unappreciative of the support in the comments section of the holy trinity and on some blog posts**. Gosh, I’m actually quite dumbstruck by the passionate support. Thank you guys, I do appreciate it! I’m just trying to be realistic about it. I should probably be a bit more upset and protective about this issue, but then I’d lie. If we have been deliberately copied it just goes to show that Africa had a good idea someone else wanted. Not a bad thing at all! (Although, I do share Rafiq’s sentiments a little there…)
This is actually a new feature on I’ve implemented on Afrigator, but it could prove to be quite a handy thing on a lot of other social networks. It is always difficult when you sign up with a new social network to find your “real” friends. You either have to search for every one of them or you have to browse through a friend’s friends to try and find them. It was really easy and simple to implement, so I cannot see why more of these kind of features won’t happen. It would be quite cool to see this in something like Blueworld… hint, nudge, wink…
We as bloggers almost always maintain some form of blog roll. This blog roll carried little value to yourself as the only people who ever benefits in terms of back links are the people on there. This has changed. You can now use your blogroll to find your friends on Afrigator. The only condition is that your blogroll links must be marked up according to XFN standards. That might seem daunting or scary, but if you use the brilliant Wordpress platform, it is a breeze actually! (I’ll demonstrate in another screen cast)
For more information on how to do it and how it works, see this video:
I’ve been feeling pretty shitty these last couple of days about this issue. A feeling of great sadness and helplessness. All we seem to do is talk, talk, talk about the issue, but actions speak louder than words and talk seems cheap. I feel a bit better now that I saw how many bloggers feel the same and how many are actually putting action to words!
We launched a new feature last night, which was supposed to be developed and released a little later, but due to this current atrocity, we’ve decided to overturn schedules and bump it up the priority list. We released Topics, which is a filter feature based on very specific topics. For example, in this case, it is the Xenophobia issue that is dealt with. It will filter all new blog posts, podcasts, news articles and Youtube videos that is relevant to Xenophobia in South Africa. Go check it out here: http://afrigator.com/topics/xenophobia
We’ve made a special banner at the top of Afrigator pages to link to that page for now, just in case you are wondering how the hell you get there!
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!!!
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We just released Afrigator Beta verion 2.0 (hehe) and I’m tired, but excited! Charl Norman from Bandwidth blog did a quick summary and a more comprehensive list can be found on our Afrigator blog. I will basically over the next few days as time allows, do a more in depth discussion on what is new and how it works.
I want to give a special thanks to Charl Norman, Saul Kropman, Nic Haralambous and Charl van Niekerk for their support! If you see any bugs, please let us know by emailing the nasty to bugs@afrigator.com We would greatly appreciate that!
I also want to give Mark Forrester a special word up. It can be quite daunting for designers who are not at all used to working on the command line to suddenly have to issue subversion commands and use Capistrano to update the site and work independently. He really impressed me with how quickly he got settled on the command line. Why to go Marky! We’ll make a propeller head of you soon…
I guess, for me personally the two features that stands out the most are the customisation features. The fact that you can filter content by country and be able to see selected posts from selected categories on the home page. You need to set it up once, and every time you return thereafter you are presented with relevant information. That was our aim and I’d say we’re not at all that far off target. Beyond doubt, the customisation would continue and grow…
So my next post will be how to customise, but first, some other urgent work to do… Once more, thank you to everyone for the support.
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Wow, its been a year today! In all fairness, I’ve been a couple of weeks behind on joining the team, but it feels a lot longer than only one year…
Its been an extra-ordinary ride. I’ve learned an incredibly lot, which was ultra cool. Optimizing MySQL (a HUGE thanks to Ian Gilfillan who has written a MySQL book and his tips and tricks found on various development sites helped incredibly lot!), Python multi-threading and Python in general (another HUGE thank you to Neville Newey from Muti for his advice!), to name a few…
We’ve been a bit on the quiet side of late, due to obligations with our daytime/paying work. Its not easy to run a monster like this with only spare time to spare, which has been sparse of late. There are a million-and-one things in the pipeline, now I just need the time do get those done!
Last night Neville released a first draft of a REST API for Muti! POX, just as I like it… So I’m quite privileged and honoured to be one of the first to have an implementation of the API. Where better than Afrigator?
If you visit a blog author’s page, and this user has done the necessary changes to his profile, you would see it in action below the blog posts and podcasts. It shows basically the following details:
1. User’s Muti username
2. User’s total number of submissions
3. User’s total amount of Kudus earned
4. The last 10 links muti’d with the following details with the date, kudus, link and title.
I used MyWebShots for the thumbnails as I thought it would round it off nicely!
So if you would like to activate this on Afrigator, simply log in and go to the dashboard. Click on the “Edit your profile” button.
At the bottom of that form, there is a field for your Muti username. Enter your username over at Muti in there and save it.
Bang, thats it! If you visit your profile page (You can do it by clicking on your blog name in the main dashboard page) you should fine your Muti details there.
The XML specification is plain and simple at the moment. There are bound to be a couple of changes, but for now, this is how it looks and how it works:
All you need to do is to send an REST request to http://muti.co.za/api/userinfo/{name-of-user}
For example, here is the request to see my Muti stuff: http://muti.co.za/api/userinfo/stii
This will return some XML which you can then use to do what you please with:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<user>
<submissions>316</submissions>
<kudus>500</kudus>
<link>
<title>The title of the latest post</title>
<url>http://somesite.com/link-to-post</url>
<date>2008-02-08T03:26Z</date> <!-- Date & Time post was submitted -->
<votes>12</votes> <!-- Number of votes to date -->
</link>
<link>
<title>The title of the second last post</title>
<url>http://othersite.com/link-to-post2</url>
<date>2008-02-08T03:26Z</date> <!-- Date & Time post was submitted -->
<votes>12</votes> <!-- Number of votes to date -->
</link>
</user>
Now all you need to do is to parse that bit of XML and Bob’s your uncle!
“…January should be a busy month for the Afrigator team as they prepare to get their current beta version live…”
and
“…Throughout the rest of the year I believe they will focus on aggregating African Social Media by tapping into more API’s of African sites instead of relying on huge international sites such Flickr and YouTube…”
Tyler, dude, scary how accurate you can predict the future. Spot on, but there are quite a few new surprises waiting. I’m going to have to get my fat ass into serious gear and iron out the current bugs, so that we can start development of an array of new services (which I’d love to tell you about, but 3 other okes will have my hide should I do so…). So, best advice is to cheer me on so I can iron out the nasties and get cracking on the new/good stuff.
2007 ended in a crazy, crazy fashion. Therefore there was little energy and time spent on ironing out of the nasties in Afrigator. Thing is that the way 2007 ended was an exciting sign/omen for 2008. Lots will happen for me personally, so I was quite happy to let it ride and get it going.
On a personal level, I took a mini holiday between Christmas and now and it was intense and awesome. I’ve got some fantastic gifts for both Christmas and my birthday which awakened the “Jamie Oliver” in me and I’m now doing ALL the cooking duties in the house and are LOVING it! Yes, in the past my cooking repertoire was bland and boring, but with great new utensils it is picking up and I’ve discovered that great food is not a nice to have, but an absolute necesity. So I’ll be seriously honing my culinary skills. I’ve also realised that being over weight is SERIOUSLY overrated. Therefore I’ll be dusting off the squash raquet and jogging shoes and get into gear for a more active and healthier year.
May it be a great oh eight to you all!
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The Jozi 27dinner was simply friggin’ amazing! Me and Feisty Bev got on the big bird and migrated north for one evening of great fun. Although badly powered by Eskom, it was a huge success! It was also the very first time the four Afriguys (credit: Nic) were together in one room all to announce the new beta release of Afrigator.
Mike, Justin, me and Mark. It was great seeing you all and specially meeting Mark for the first time! The Afrigator ride is probably one of the best.
Funny thing was when Vincent was trying to poke out his mind’s eye after looking into some serious crack… Groogle did us all the favor to capture the moment and forever cementing it into our minds.
Special thanx to Nic for picking up my dinner bill! I really appreciate it and next time its on me! Once again, thank you Stormhoek for the talk lube. Must say, I love this social networking, Web2.0 style, offline. I’ll be there again!
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I seriously don’t get it. Lately a lot have been doing the rounds of people cloning other people’s ideas. W.T.F. Rather S.F.W!!! I mean, was Wordpress the first ever blogging software created?! I seriously doubt it. Yet most people uses it!
So, was Wibble the first ever group blog? Did Vince and Matthewclone Wibble? Really, who cares! Did Muti rip off Digg or Reddit? Did Amatomu and Afrigator clone Technorati? Surely that NOT relevant AT ALL as what is important at the end of the day is which service is liked and used more and by whom. THAT is what is relevant IMHO. Not who cloned who and how and why. Wibble does not allow me to comment without having to register. M&G’s Thought Leader does! Guess where I will spend my spare minutes…
So Nokia is cloning the iPhone! As far as I am concerned (and I hope that transpired in my previous post) it gives us more choice and/or options. If I don’t like it I go to the “clone”. If it was not for “cloning” sites, we would not evolve at the rate we currently do! (Almost) every clone adds to the functionality of the greater idea and gets better and better. If it does NOT get better, well, then if the developer’s goal was to knock the original he failed miserably! Only if that was his plan… If it was done for different reasons, then you go boy! Clone away!
Cloning web services is an integral part of the internet’s evolution. If you have a problem with it, you should maybe stop and think for a minute… If you are the creator of the cloned product, then boy! you better watch out… There is a lot of pretty talented people out there and you better stay on top of your game, else you’ll be (God forbid) knocked out by a clone!
This is my first attempt and hopefully it will improve in time.
