Afrigator Beta2.0 - Content and usability

Next thing on the list is the content. If you look at the home page, the news page, the blogs page and the podcasts page, you will see various tabs. It is the various ways we decided to organize content.

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!!!

One Comment to "Afrigator Beta2.0 - Content and usability"

• Charl van Niekerk said: On 05/18/2008 at 5:33 am

  Another great post (no really)!

  However, here I go off topic once again…

  We all know about the Afrigator mobile interface but how does one bypass the browser sniffing? Most sites use m.example.org but I see this doesn’t work for Afrigator. Although I think the browser sniffing is pretty cool, at times it can miss the target.

  Sometimes you want the ability to open the normal site from your mobile and the ability to open the mobile site from your desktop. Personally I like the mobile interface of Twitter as it will do browser sniffing but then gives you an option to manually go to either site.

  I’m sure there must be some bypass for Afrigator you used during development - anything you can publish in public?

Spit it out!

Filed in: General and sometimes Rants by: Stii