May
15
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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Afrigator Stii
May
14
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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Afrigator Stii
Apr
03
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!
To read a bit more, see the Afrigator blog.
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Afrigator Stii
Feb
08
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.
Click here to see mine implemented : http://afrigator.com/author/14
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!
Thanks to Neville for making this possible!
Next up: Zoopy!
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Afrigator, muti.co.za Stii
Jan
01
I’ll leave the predictions to the masters and thought I’d give you a bit more insight of what is in the pipeline for myself and Afrigator instead.
Lets start with the Gator. Tyler predicted:
“…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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Afrigator, General and sometimes Rants Stii
Nov
28
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.
It was simply awesome to have met all my online heroes finally. Vincent Maher, Nic Haralambous, Charl Norman, Simone Puterman, Eve D, Craig Nichols, Gregor Rohrig, Carly Ritz, Paul Jacobson, Tyler Reed, Armand du Plessis, Wezzo, Roger Saner, Carl Spies, Darren Gorton, to name but a few! You guys are all giants and a truly amazing bunch of individuals. It was a great privilege to share some of Stormhoek’s finest wine with all of you!
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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Afrigator, GeekDinner!, Social Web Stii
Aug
30
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 Matthew clone 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!
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Tags: cloning, afrigator, amatomu, muti, wibble, thought-leader, wordpress
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Afrigator, Software Development, Web 2.0, muti.co.za, web development Stii
Aug
29
Time is so limited lately. And to top it all off, we had to pay more school fees to the Gator… Fortunately, a bit of database caching made life a lot prettier on the performance side!
In between everthing we’ve managed to bring out two new things with a whole lot still to come!
The first is that the Gator is catching birds now. Twittering birds. How? By Twittering himself, of course! If you are a keen twitterer (specially if you use your instant messenger to update your Twitter status and follow your fellow twitter friends) you can select to follow and/or receive IM notifications at http://twitter.com/afrigator. You will be sent a random item selected from a pool of the latest 24 hours posts in the african blogging continent. Only 1 random item an hour! We have no intentions to flood your IM. 24 a day is what you’ll get.
The second thing is quite a nice one. It is some very interesting stats, which will (hopefully) prove that social media is NOT dead! A bunch of cool graphs indicating some community statistics like:
- how many clicks does the gator send to users per month
- how many clicks per day
- how many blog posts per month
- and per day
- how many unique visitors and pageviews per day
- how much traffic in total
- the daily average
You will find it by clicking on the Blog Trends button in the main menu. Go check it out!
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Tags: afrigator, statistics, twitter
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Afrigator, Software Development Stii
Jul
31
As you’ve undoubtedly noticed, I’ve been dead quiet. That is because I’m leading a very unbalanced life at the moment… Not good. Too busy, but only because I fell in that trap! I desperately need to manage my time a lot better… At least with my shiny new Macbook, I can sit in bed late night and blog! I know Adii does not recommend that, but beggers of time cannot be choosers of time. Besides, I think I’ll just have to learn how to create time, then all problems would be solved! If you suffer the same syndrome, I’ve noticed Miguel has some straight-up great advice!
So did Justin remind me today that Afrigator was featured in Business 2.0 Magazine! Feels good, I must admit… Good job Mark, Mike & JH!
Now look at Mr. J Hartman, looking all fancy! The Times should be so lucky, hey?
Thanks Vincent, Hash and everyone else for the kind words. Much appreciated and respect!
Blogged with Flock
Tags: afrigator, business2.0, web2.0
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Afrigator, Web 2.0 Stii
May
29
Just a quick one to tell you about another great addition to the Afrigator Stats page. We are now recording how many times links to your blog gets clicked on a daily basis. You can log in, click on your blog’s view stats link and to go see!
If you’d like to see exactly how many times it was clicked, you can hover your mouse over the green bars to see the exact amount of times links to your blog was clicked. Enjoy!
technorati tags:afrigator, stats, gatorlove
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Afrigator Stii
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