Mar 12

Afrigator goes realtime!

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to the Afrigator RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

We have just completed the implementation of Pubsubhubbub on Afrigator. What does this awkward word mean though? It means that if your blog is Pubsubhubbub enabled, your posts would be aggregated in Afrigator as they get published. Realtime!

Traditionally, we used to poll your RSS feeds every 2 hours to check if you have any new content. If you had something new, we’d save it in our database. If you didn’t have anything new, we just downloaded your feed for nothing. Yes, we know, not very efficient.

If you are blogging on Blogspot.com or Wordpress.com, your blog will update Afrigator in realtime! If you have your own Wordpress installation (i.e. Wordpress.org) you will need to install the PuSHPress plugin. Find it here.

If you’re using any other platform, you can check out how to enable your feed using Google’s appspot service. It is fairly straightforward, so do it! If you have questions or need help, feel free to talk to me.

Once your blog has been enabled, we’ll pick up that you’ve enabled your blog when we do our rounds again using our traditional feed parsing and you need to do nothing more. Once we’ve successfully subscribed to your feed, it will update Afrigator when you publish a new post! Awesome, hey?

At the moment, there are already 1442 blogs that are Pubsubhubbub enabled.

Mar 8

Win R1000 Luxury 4 Less Vouchers

Three lucky bloggers will each receive Luxury 4 Less vouchers to the value of R1000 for South Africa’s first and only VIP Shopping Club

Premium Brands + Bargain Hunting + Special Treatment =Luxury4Less is here – for YOU!

You are cordially invited to become a prestige member of SA’s first and only VIP Shopping Club

A windfall for the discerning shopper who seeks out quality and style, even in a recession.

You might already have heard whisperings about them, South Africa’s first and only Private Shopping Club, Luxury4Less?!. They have graced the pages of GQ, FHM, Garden and Home, Glamour Magazine, Sunday Times and Business Report and a few others. They have also been on radio and TV (Highveld Stereo, CNBC Africa and Classic FM) – all over the country, people in the know are talking about the new star in South African eCommerce, Luxury4Less, forking out premium brands to its exclusive member base at discounts that are hard to believe.

“Premium brands”, include high-desire international labels like Baby Phat, Fendi, Carolina Herrera, Hugo Boss, Calvin Klein, Superga, British Knights, Apple, Sony, Rolex, Swatch and many, many more….

HOW TO JOIN AND HOW TO WIN

To win one of five R1000 Luxury4Less vouchers simply send an email to dudes@afrigator.com telling us that you’d like to get R1000. The only requirement to entering is that you have to spend your Luxury4 Less vouchers within 14 days from receiving them and then write a blog post about how you spent your R1000 voucher.
More great news!
Every blogger that registers as a member of Luxury4Less will receive R100 free voucher as a welcome gift.
How to register:
*Log onto www.luxury4less.co.za
*Click on the ‘Become a member’ text link
*Enter your e-mail address and the following promo code: afrigator@luxury4less.co.za

The competition ends on the 31st March 2009, so register quickly.

This competition is only open to residents of South Africa.

Jan 19

Afrigator’s new contact details

This is a very quick update to tell you that Afrigator has moved offices to Gardens in Cape Town. Not only do we have a new address but we also have a new contact number so if you’re trying to get a hold of us we suggest visiting our updated Contact page on our corporate site.

If you’re ever in the area it is a pre-requisite to pop in for a cup of coffee or, if it’s late enough for you, a beer with the Afrigator team.

Dec 21

Scheduled Server Maintenance / Downtime

Server Downtime

It’s that time of the year again where we have to perform some routine server maintenance. We have historically waited until the end of the year to perform these updates so as to prevent as little inconvenience to you guys and this year is no different.

The maintenance period is set to start on Monday 21 December 2009 at 17:30 SAST (GMT +2) and will end on Tuesday 22 December 2009 at 01:00 SAST (GMT +2). The following services are set to be affected during this period:

1) Afrigator
2) Adgator
3) Gatorpeeps
4) GatorURL

Please note that this doesn’t mean that all these services will be unavailable for the duration of the maintenance period, it simply means that any/all of these services may be affected intermittently during this period.

We will do our best to ensure that each of these services have the highest available uptime over this period and we will endeavour to minimize the inconvenience to you as best we can.

We thank you in the advance for your patience.

Dec 17

Parlotones Winners announced

Right, I know there’s been a lot of highly anxious entrants in the win a private dinner with The Parlotones competition and we must apologise for the delay in getting the winners announced.

The good news is that we can officially announce that our first winner is Harmony for her two blog posts entitled Harmony’s Dinner with the Parlotones and A Giant Mistake … or not.

The judges were unanimous in their decision as Harmony’s creativity really carried through into the spirit of the competition. Harmony has just won a private dinner with the Parlotones for herself and a partner at a location in Jozi and we can’t wait to arrange all the finer details with her soon.

Our second winner is… drum-roll please… Raymond Trueman with his blog post titled Parlotones Giant Mistake Competition Entry. Apart from buying a whole case of Giant Mistake wine it is clear that Raymond is almost as big a Parlotones fan as myself so it made perfect sense to award the second prize to him.

As you may have noticed both winners are from Gauteng and while the judges were really hoping to get winners from both Jozi and Cape Town we ended up in a scenario where there were more entries from Gauteng and almost all of them were deserving winners.

Well done to both our winners. We’ll be in contact with you shortly to work out the finer details!

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