Example using XFN and Optimus to find friends on Afrigator

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…

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.

Filed in: Afrigator, Semantic Web by: Stii

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Optimus, the ultimate Microformats parser

While I was writing my most recent Tech Leader post, I stumbled upon Optimus, a Microformats parser brought to us by the guys over at Microformatique.

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

Filed in: Semantic Web by: Stii

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Please support UnitedForAfrica.co.za

A project born from the recent Xenophobia crisis in South Africa. Please help and support this initiative by reporting incidents you know of. You can also find out who needs your help and how you can assist.

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.

Filed in: South Africa, Web 2.0 by: Stii

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Afrigator Beta2.0 - Lets amplify the Xenophobia issue

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!

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!

Filed in: Afrigator by: Stii

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What can we as bloggers do about the Xenophobia crisis?

I mean, look at me, I’m all the way down here in George. There is no problems down here! Yet, yesterday was hands down the most depressing Monday I’ve had in a long, LONG time. Although I’m not close to the atrocities happening, it affected me emotionally. Mainly due to my good friend Gregor’s post being the first one to read on a Monday morning.

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?

Filed in: Blogging by: Stii

24 comments

TED ain’t doing Cape Town, South Africa this year

Its sad news, my fellow geeks. Sad indeed! This morning I checked my inbox after a fabulous weekend and BAM! the news hit me. TED (short for Technology, Entertainment, Design) has released a blog post on Friday:

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

Filed in: South Africa, Web 2.0, ideas 2.0 by: Stii

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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!!!

Filed in: General and sometimes Rants by: Stii

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Afrigator Beta2.0 - Custom feature

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!!!

Filed in: Afrigator by: Stii

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Afrigator Beta 2 - Tons of new stuff…

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.

Filed in: Afrigator by: Stii

8 comments

Spammers offer nothing for R1 plus postage and packaging

A little while back, Deal A Day got their fingers burnt when they SPAMMED the wrong people. Simon made a big fuss about it and word spread and action was taken. Deal A Day’s hosting of their site was suspended by their hosts Centeq (word up! and thanx to The Plonk) and they had to move.

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 ;-).

Filed in: Funnies by: Stii

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