On the Development front
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So we’ve seemingly been quiet about new developments on Afrigator however it’s not because we aren’t working like mad! This past month unfortunately has been dedicated to problem-solving and we’ve spent a lot of time optimising the Afrigator system for better performance as well as working on stabilisation.
At the moment we have 965 sites signed up and processing these feeds on a continuous basis has proven to be a huge learning curve for both Stii and myself. As a result we’ve redone the entire feed fetching and parsing process and we’ve migrated completely to Python for this process as PHP simply could not cope with it.
Stii has a really good post on this development which highlights some of the frustrations we’ve gone through in trying to achieve this but I’m pleased to say that almost three days later we’re now stable and Python is working like a charm.
I must take this opportunity to thank Stii for all his hard work on this. It wasn’t easy to achieve but he was absolutely amazing during this process. I also want to thank Neville Newey from Muti who, without pay, really helped guide us in the move to Python. Thanks Neville, we now owe you big time!!!
So the net result of the last months’ work is that we’ve redone our queries to the database server, moved to Python for all the hard work and optimised the server to run faster than ever. There are still some small niggly issues which we need to sort out but we’re almost there and new features should start hitting the live site in the next couple weeks.
Mark said,
Wrote on July 6, 2007 @ 12:36 pm
Well done chaps! It sounded awfully complicated.
Thanks for all the help Neville. We all appreciate it hugely!
hash said,
Wrote on July 6, 2007 @ 2:56 pm
I’m glad you’ve gotten onto a more stable coding platform. I tell you, that Neville guy is good at this coding stuff…
Afrigator keeps improving all the time, keep up the good work!
Omar said,
Wrote on July 12, 2007 @ 9:19 am
I discovered Afrigator today; and it’s superb! Now I can read blogs on Africa all in one place. Thanks for the excellent work!
Nino said,
Wrote on July 12, 2007 @ 7:27 pm
Hello,
It seems that the RSS feed link ( http://afrigator.com/feed/ ) of Afrigator is not working.
I try it in Firefox, and I get an error.
Can you have a look? Perhaps the problem is from my side.
Nino
Justin Hartman said,
Wrote on July 13, 2007 @ 10:55 pm
@hash, thanks as always for your kind words of support and yes, Neville does have a little skill or two
@Omar: WOW man, welcome to Afrigator. I’m really pleased you’re finding benefit to using the site and if you need anything you should join our support group which you can find here. You can ask questions, view what other members have been saying and even chat if you feel like it.
@Nino: Thanks for pointing this out to us. There is a bug with the feed at the moment and we’re working on getting it resolved ASAP!!!
Neil Blakey-Milner said,
Wrote on July 14, 2007 @ 11:18 am
Are you guys using the excellent Universal Feed Parser to handle feeds now? It’s pretty much the best out there for handling the variety of formats and the broken forms thereof.
Anyway, good choice on the move to Python, and feel free to bug me if you need any help.
Neil
Justin Hartman said,
Wrote on July 17, 2007 @ 11:04 am
Neil, we certainly are now using the UFS and trust me Stii and I are going to take you up on your offer of help!!! Thanks for that!
Recent issues and improved performance « Afrigator Blog said,
Wrote on August 16, 2007 @ 10:52 am
[...] also managed to get rid of most of the duplicate entries on the Afrigator site due to an issue we experienced last month so searches are now more accurate and the results on the site should be more [...]