Apr
14
Muti just implemented a great new feature IMHO. You can add Muti users to your friends and view only their posts. The standard pool of submissions stay as it is, but an additional pool is added where I can quickly filter out everything and see only what my Muti friends submitted by date.
Here is how it works:
Underneath the title of the submission you see the username. Click it. 
You’ll see there is a button that says Follow username.
Click it!
Next it will tell you that You are now following username.
Repeat!
To see only your friends’ submissions, you will see a link in your user menu that says “friends posts”. Click it! 
You will now see a list of all your friends’ latest posts in date order. So no matter how the votes go, you’ll only and always see your friends’ submissions! Neat! So, if you feel that the voting is getting you down (excuse the pun…) then use this. Same thing, if a certain someone (wink, wink) persist to submit his own “front page of Google” bullshit, simply ignore it by checking out only your friends’ posts!
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muti.co.za 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
07
Its a new year. As with every new year in the past, it is good and refreshing to start it with something refreshing. So I got myself a little dedicated server and rolled a cool Ruby on Rails setup on there all in the name of “research”. I’ve set it up to run a Typo blog (which is the preferred blogging platform for me at the moment), running behind Apache 2 and a sweet little Mongrel cluster. Nifty!
I know that some people have warned against running “scattered” blogs, but it is kind of the only option when wanting to experiment with different platforms and languages. So why not. Maybe there could possibly be a use for not rolling everything into one single blog.
So for the next couple of months (hopefully), I will be blogging with a multiple personality. I’ll give some views later on over there on how I find Typo. It would be pretty hard beating Wordpress…
So, please, visit me every once in a while over here: http://stii.co.za
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Blogging, Ruby (on Rails) Stii
Nov
05
Apart from the free Sitepoint book (which expires soon! So hurry up and get it) and the book “Agile Web Development with Rails” you have to bookmark Railscasts. Railscasts is an extremely useful resource with screencasts of how to get some pretty awesome things done in Rails. There is currently 78 casts on various specific topics and every single one is more useful than the next. I really enjoy it and I honestly love the idea of watching how to get things done while at the same time it is explained in detail. Check it out:
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Ruby (on Rails), Tutorials Stii
Oct
26
Elan says in his interview with Charl Norman:
“We believe that SN platforms like Facebook are very hard to compete with but social Media such as Digg is an easier area to challenge because we are sure we can provide MUCH more local relevance than a Digg can. You won’t see a headline about SA winning RWC on the Digg, Reddit or Stumble Upon front pages?
The interesting challenge is going to be if our local competitors like MG, IOL, iafrica, Times etc will be willing to add the laaik.it button? They are all adding Digg, Muti, Reddit buttons etc - Hard to see how they cannot add us.. we want to see content from everywhere on the site. We are not trying to create a walled garden for Media24. That’s NB.”
It looks like it was probably built and researched around 24.com’s own user base. Elan says they are not trying to build a walled garden for Media 24, yet they have nothing new to offer to the world outside their garden walls. I was asked what I thought about it yesterday and my immediate answer was: “it is 24.commish”. It lacks basic functionality, as Adii said, and the link submission process is tedious. Not at all well planned at this stage. Their users would use it regardless. Yes, it is true, they are still in beta so it could be argued that those things are still in the development schedule.
I can see no reason whatsoever that the above mentioned people would not add your button. It would drive your share of the online community to them so there is absolutely no reason why they would not do it. Apart from the fact that it is hard to add something that is not there. I assume it is still in the development schedule? Riiight, well let us know and we’ll add it.
Another thing, just in case you were wondering, is that if you do happen to implement a submission API of sorts, I’m pretty sure the guys at Muti would enable their submission process to add everything that is being submitted to Muti to Laaikit automatically. Double exposure! Thats breaking down walls for you. It remains to be seen if you are true to your word in that you want to play outside the 24.com garden walls. Prove it. Give us API’s to work with and it might become very, very interesting!
I do not think this is a threat at all to Muti. My guess is that the only users Muti would lose at this stage is the Mclaren entourage. Big loss, I know. We’ll just have to learn to live without them.
I do however agree with what Uno said, they have 60% of the SA online share and that in itself is a good thing. We’re all going to benefit from the exposure to a great big chunk of the SA online scene. It is good. They are going to expose their walled in users to the rest of us, so I’m quite excited about that.
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Tags: laaikit, muti, social-bookmarking
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Social Web, Web 2.0, muti.co.za Stii
Oct
22
Admittedly, I have also supported the anti-self submission protocol on Muti in the past, but have since made my peace with it and quite frankly (possibly due to lack of time) given up caring about what I consider spam posts. I think it is becoming a rather senseless argument and there will always be those that are going to be unhappy by the state of affairs. Although Vince have a point about the Terms and Conditions and the possible prevention of creating duplicate accounts, I think that by implementing a simple filter could possibly be the best solution.
Most of Muti users are logged in all the time. So what needs to be done is that you as user should be able to “ignore” other users and their submissions by adding them to your exclude list. This way anyone and everyone can submit whatever they want and if you do not like what they submit, simply exclude them. Every time you come back to Muti, you will see everything, but submissions by those users you excluded.
There has been self submissions in the past thats been very valuable and interesting links which then get voted off just due to the fact that it is self submitted. It has also been the bane of Muti right from the start. The source of all unhappiness. This way, you decide and if you are excluded by users, you take it up with the users and leave Dave and Neville out of it. They are both outstanding people for the record. Then there will never have to be a banning ever again by them. If you don’t like the so called SPAM then stop bitching about it and exclude the users you consider SPAMMERS.
Another thing that should also be considered is having a favorite users list. Users can create a list of favorite users and can have a section where only their favorite users’ submissions would be listed. Could be a useful tool.
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Tags: muti, voting, spamming
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muti.co.za Stii
Oct
22
The people at Sitepoint has released their Ruby on Rails book for free for a limited period of time! The offer expires in 40 days at the time of writing this and if you are interested in learning RoR you should go and get it. Hop on over and download your free copy.
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Ruby (on Rails), Tutorials, web development 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
May
30
I’ve been under a rock the past 3 to 4 weeks. Only 2 nights ago, Justin told me what the whole whoohaa is about.
Today I read this article by My Broadband (found through Afrigator ) and I was wondering (since I know sweet blow-all about legal issues - Paul, help please!).
What got me thinking was this:
“When Internet users subscribe to services that allow them to operate their own blogs or take part in anonymous discussion forums or chat rooms,they first have to register with the blog or chat room operator.
These registrations require the submission of the user’s true identity and contact details. Although the user may provide fraudulent details, his or her email address is generally authenticated by sending the username and password necessary to activate the blog or discussion forum to the email address provided.
The true identities of these users are generally governed by the operator’s terms and conditions, which prevent the operator from disclosing it unless authorised thereto by due legal process.”
But what about services using OpenID? Where all you store is the user’s OpenID and nothing else. So if you do get hammerred to reveal the user’s “true identity” all you can do is pass the buck to the OpenID provider, is that correct? I feel sorry for the oke being defamed, since he’ll go on a wild goose chase of note here! (Okay, this is not yet an issue since not many services
has adopted the use of OpenID, so its not really all that relevant… YET.)
As Vincent said:
“It is easy to track you, there is a permanent record of what you said
that you might not have any control over anymore because you were
showing your muscle on someone else’s blog and its simply in bad taste.”
Caught you will get caught, so watch you tongue…
technorati tags:openid, patriciadelille
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Blogging, Semantic Web Stii
May
22
So, you are happily sorted out as far as logging in and signing up goes. Now you can start using some of the nice new features!
The first I want to tell you about is the MyGator feature. MyGator lets you save certain blogs so that it will only show you blog posts from the saved blogs. Almost exactly the same as the front page with the exception that it only shows your preferred blogs.
So how do you do it? First of all, you need to go to Afrigator and you need to be signed up and logged in. Underneath each post, there is a link that says Add to MyGator. Click that link to add the blog to your MyGator page.
Once clicked and added successfully, you will see a Remove from MyGator link. Naturally, if you’d like to remove a blog, you’d click that link.
If you now click on the MyGator button in the main menu, you will see blog posts only of the blogs you have added to MyGator.
You can also see a list of blogs that you have added to your MyGator page. Click the View blogs button.
Alrighty then, go and enjoy!
technorati tags:afrigator, mygator, features
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Afrigator, Tutorials Stii
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