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Saianora!

ReadWriteWeb wrote an article on the future of blogging revealed. Truth be told, they might be right, but God forbid they are. Lifestreaming is awesome and so is micro-blogging. The problem is this:

It is making us lazy. Eric, by no means am I saying you’re lazy. All evidence to the contrary, but you’re lazy to blog as much as you’ve done in the past, as am I and a lot of others. Its just easier to say things in a 140 characters. Its easier to monitor and list what I read, rather than to write about it. Our attention span is all fucked up.

A while back, daily del.icio.us link posts was all the rage and everyone was doing it. It almost seemed like an easy way out to not have to sit down and write something, carefully thinking about it beforehand. Some still persists to do it. After a while it became irritating to readers. My prediction is that by mixing your online activity with your main writings/blog would dilute your content and you’d end up pissing people off, rather than entertaining/educating them. It might seem weird and strange, but people want to read what others say, not what they read.

I do admit, there is a use for lifestreams. Yes, its not a bad thing having them somewhere on your site. It would be terrible to have it dilute your original content and IMHO should be kept separate. Then again, with our sacred little blogosphere turning into a Paris Hilton tabloid, it might be a good thing

Thanks to Nic for the link!

Needless to say that I’ve invested in one of these uniquely designed t’s! I went for the Cthulu Watercity Invasion since I’m a bit of an HP Lovecraft fan, but it was a very tough choice between this one and the Garden Route Geeks one by my friend Willie. In fact, I’m bound to buy another, so it is on my shopping list!

I love the site. I love the checkout procedure and the way it is designed. Quick, painless and funky! Eric’s found gold in his brilliant developer, Robert Stuttaford. I don’t know who the designers are, but they’re doing a stirling job. Delivery was quick, so kudos there! The shirt quality is awesome. The printing is of the highest quality! All-in-all, I love the entire experience!

I’m just wondering what happened to the blogger warz? When will the next one be? Personally, I’d love to see a showdown between Vincent Maher and Bolton Deventer. Now THAT is something I’d pay for…

Oh, and this was also quite cool. Instead of a pesky label that scratches your tender neck after it was flogged by the African sun in summertime, there is a cool little message instead! Great stuff!

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…)

**Here is some more on this issue:
Regator Looks Mighty Familiar - Mike Stopforth
Regator.com steals our brand - coincidence? - Justin Hartman
Shocking: Regator rip off Afrigator - Nic Haralambous
Regator - Perfect example of how Africa gets used - Rafiq Phillips
Regator steals Afrigator’s brand - Mark Forrester

Two of his colleagues did plead guilty and both were given a fine of $3000 and a five month prison sentence. Heavy, but not as heavy as this:

“I had a meeting with my probation officer today and he told me that he has to install monitoring software onto my PC. No big deal to me; that is part of my sentence,” he wrote on his Lost and Alone blog. “However, their software doesn’t support GNU/Linux (which is what I use). So, he told me that if I want to use a computer, I would have to use an OS that the software can be installed on.” The monitoring software in question is only available for Microsoft Windows. Neither Linux nor a Macintosh running OS X would be an acceptable platform.

SHIT!!! That’s just plain cruel and inhumane punishment! That is more like a death sentence to a Linux user. Heavy… Don’t pirate software or you’ll be FORCED to use Windows. How much does THAT suck?!

Here is the full story.

Programs written in Python look very different from Pike programs, but Python and Pike are similar when it comes to ideas and use. Python is more widely used and has more libraries available. Pike on the other hand is faster, has a more advanced type system, and has better support for object-oriented programming. Pike’s more C++-like syntax makes it easier to get started with for programmers who know C++, C or Java.

Now, I’m in no position to say this is true or not. I’ve only started reading about Pike tonight. Here is an example of Pike’s syntax.

int main()
{
  write("Hi there! What's your name?\n");
  string name = Stdio.stdin->gets();
  write("Nice to meet you, " + name + "!\n");
  return 0;
}

Not sure I really like it, but wth, PHP looks much worse at times!

If there are anyone out there that has worked with Pike before, it would be quite interesting to hear your opinion! It does seem Pike is not as well supported as Python / PHP / Ruby…

I’m not sure if this was available in Twhirl version 0.8.1. I first saw this in version 0.8.2, so it might be a good idea to upgrade to the latest version. I was going to make a screencast to demonstrate how to enable and use it, but fortunately Maria Reyes-McDavis did me the favour of doing so already! It is still very awkward for me to do screen casts :). Check out the video if you’d like to see it in action.

Nevertheless, I seem to have swatted the buggers, but in the process I was feeling pretty much anti-social in the online sense of the word. I abandoned plurk, avoided Facebook and did not have much to write about other than how shit I feel, so I didn’t blog here, nor on Tech Leader. Twitter still isn’t much of a problem as they’re doing an outstanding job themselves in limiting my Twitter consumption.

It sucks. Although I had more than regular contact with my flesh and blood buddies, I missed all the geek-speak and babbling we normally do online. You’d think that with all those other things not distracting you, you’d be 10 times as productive. Sorry, WRONG! I’ve grown very used to be distracted by all the other things so I’m constantly searching for something… Its like “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for” all the time. Okay, to be fair, it could have been the bugs that had me down… Seriously though, why would I want to work without all the distractions? Its not that much fun anyway!

Over the past couple of years, my attention span has become, uhm, flexible. I get tired after reading the first 140 characters of a book. Therefore, I read 3 or more books at once, 140 characters at a time. Works like a charm!

Anyways, guess what I’m trying to say is, I’m debugged and stable and have a backlog to catch up with!

A special thanks to Optimus over at Microformatique and the super talented Dmitry Baranovskiy for taking the parsing headaches out the way.

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:

Using XFN to find friends on a Social Network from Stii Pretorius on Vimeo.

Just a quick note, its not as simple to make a screen cast as it seems! This is my first attempt and hopefully it will improve in time.

In my humble opinion, Optimus is the best you’ll find out there by far! All you do is pass a url of a web page to it, and it will return all selected microformats in either XML, JSON or JSON-P. It utilizes a mix of XML, XSLT and PHP to obtain the required results.

What is specially cool about it is that you can use it as a web service from http://microformatique.com/optimus/ or you may download the source code and run it on your own server. It requires PHP5 as it uses the DOMDocument class and the XSLTProcessor class.

Supported Microformats are:

1. hCalendar
2. hCard
3. hEntry
4. hResume
5. hReview
6. hListing
7. hAudio
8. xFolkentry
9. adr
10. geo
11. xfn
12. votelinks
13. rel-nofollow
14. rel-tag
15. rel-license

To try it and check it out, head over to http://microformatique.com/optimus/. Enter a blog address like mine and you should at least get a couple of rel-tags or XFN’s

UnitedForAfrica.co.za is a mashup of incidents with Google Maps. There are also timelines which tells the story of how it spread.

SMS your name and area to 31864 to donate R10 to the TAC (Treatment Action Campaign) an organization worthy of your support.

UnitedForAfrica.co.za runs off the Ushahidi backbone which was created by Erik Hersman (WhiteAfrican.com) around the time when the election violence erupted in Kenya last year. Quirk eMarketing took initiative and they implemented the engine for UnitedForAfrica.co.za. Special mention goes to Tim Shier and Rafiq Phillips who are driving this initiative. Well done guys! Keep up the good work.

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!

You can also read a little more on the Afrigator blog, with some interesting stats and observations! Read it here: http://blog.afrigator.com/2008/05/22/xenophobia-in-south-africa-how-were-helping/

Just want to extend a special thanks to The Times for giving us permission to use the photo by Simphiwe Nkwali as the header image!

So I just read Mike’s call for help. Mike is so damn right. We’re all sitting on our asses behind our computers and saying things like “shame, poor foreigners” [sic] while we do the sum total of zero. Great bloody help that is, hey?!

I’ve though of this idea for a long, LONG time now, but I do not have a clue how to instigate such a thing, nor do I have the know-how of how it works. My idea is to have like a trust fund, NGO or something to which bloggers/technology people can contribute to financially. I’m more than willing giving money to any organization, but it would be nice to do it collectively as an organization I believe in, like this blogosphere I belong to. I do know that this is a fairly touchy subject and might well be a shitload of work, but I’d like something like this to happen!

Every now and again, there is a call for help. Not only in South Africa, but the whole of Africa. Yes, we can spread the word, sure, but it feels a little empty and sounds hollow. The Xenophobia crisis, the Zimbabwe/Mugabe crisis, the violence after the Kenyan elections, it has all been covered pretty well by traditional media. I’ll do my bit in spreading the word, but would love to do more and more so doing something more substantial. A great example would be the million man march which was mentioned on SA Rocks! not long ago and took place on the 13th of March. I would much rather donate some money towards their financial needs than pay an airline and some accommodation establishment just to be able to attend it!

So Mike, I’m throwing the ball back at you. You’ve got way more business savvy in your little finger and you are much better connected, so see if you could organize something like this? Nic, Justin and Gregor, I know you guys feel passionate about current affairs, maybe you could come up with some ideas? Maybe the Quirkstars or the Ideaters or the Capitalist Punks or the Stormhoekers, etc… Instead of organizing SA blog awards to get some recognition for bloggers, why not do something substantial and worthy?

If sponsors could be so easily obtained for Wordcamps, Blog awards and 27dinners, surely this should be simple? How about it?

The goal was to build on the full impact and quality of TEDGlobal held in Tanzania last year. But after reviewing progress with our licensees, we have mutually agreed that that is not going to be achievable in the available time.

Sad, sad news. I’ve been waiting anxiously to hear from them if I’ll be accepted to attend the conference or not, so now I can stop waiting. At least, now I must start waiting again to see when the next one will be!

Read the blog post here: http://blog.ted.com/2008/05/tedafrica_2008.php

On 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 are:

1. Recent Posts - these are the most recent posts fetched by our feed reader. Whoohoo! Awesome! Well, at least the blogs on there makes it awesome… the feature, well doesn’t have any surprises installed.

2. Most clicked posts - Okay, now it start getting interesting… a little at least! It is as the name suggest, the most clicked posts! It is the most clicked posts within the past 4 hours, that is.

3. Popular blogger’s posts - These are the most recent posts written by the top 100 bloggers based on our ranking algorithm.

On the usability front is the Expand / Collapse link at the top of each section (can be seen in the image below underneath the tabs). If you’d like to see a short excerpt of all the posts but don’t want to click on each of the posts’ title individually, you can simply hit that button and it would expand all the posts in that content section.

Another feature is the +previous | +next pager below each section. This allows you to browse to earlier posts in that section. It uses AJAX to speed things up significantly as it does not reload the entire page, only that section of the page.

The other content section is not new, but I think not a lot of people are fully aware of it. On the blogs page there are a menu at the top with buttons. These are categories. We try to sort new blog posts in those categories as we read them with our feeder. Sometimes it is not 100% accurate as it is experimental still. We did not want to categorise blogs, but rather individual posts. If you at my blog, I write about everything from Python to Arrowhead Flatworms.

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!!!

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!!!

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.

Today I got a notification that their advertising campaign on Offerforge came to an end so I thought hang on, last time I checked they were stranded without a host? Turns out they are back online, hosted by the very people they used to spread their SPAM.

What I did find was a somewhat funny offer on their main page. They offer nothing that usually costs R2 for R1 plus postage and packaging that could be between R8 and R130. See for yourself!

I just hope they learned a lesson and will not send email offers to people that didn’t ask for it. All the best with selling that deal to anyone. Without employing SPAM tactics that is ;-).