Afrigator launches public Beta site
It’s been almost four months since we opened up registration for our private Beta site but finally the new-look, feature-rich Afrigator is here. This is a major milestone for us as we’ve now moved out of Alpha development stage and into our first Beta release which we’re all very excited about.
The biggest issue we were faced with in being a social media aggregator was that we didn’t feel we were living up to our mandate and this spurred us on to rethink our strategy considerably and redevelop the core functionality of the website. The net result is that we are now aggregating not only Blogs but also Podcasts, Videos and main-stream media News and in the coming weeks we will also be launching a Photos section which will aggregate all of Africa’s images.
While Blogs remain our core focus, and will do so forever more, we needed to move into the social media sphere to differentiate us from our competitors.
The other major issue we had to address was a revenue model. It’s been a lot of fun working and developing this project however at some point we need to cover our costs in running the project and we also have some big plans for the future which require some money in the piggy bank. What will glare you in the face when visiting the new site is the various advertising spaces we’ve created across the site. We have various options available for advertisers and we’ll be releasing more information on this later today.
We think we’ve got a great new website and we hope you feel the same.
Major new features in this Beta version:
- New website design and user interface.
- Home page now shows the 5 latest blog posts, podcasts, videos and has a news box with the latest headlines from news sites in Africa.
- News section aggregating major news sites in Africa.
- Blogs section with new interface.
- Podcasts section that displays only podcasts from around the continent.
- Videos section which we’ve integrated into YouTube. You can now add your YouTube username in “Edit our profile” section and we’ll pull in your videos from YouTube.
- All main sections now feature categories. We categorise each item automatically and this allows for better filtering of content on the website.
- Blogs section contains a breakdown of blogs signed up by country.
- New Top 10 Posts is featured on the Blogs page and is calculated by clicks out to each post.
- The content by country has been changed to a small drop-down box making it easier to find related content from your country of interest.
- We’ve re-worked the ranking of blog sites and changed the algorithm considerably. We now incorporate blog traffic, clicks on blog posts and author ratings to calculate a blogs ranking.
- Brand new Author page has been created which shows an Author’s latest blog posts, podcasts and soon to be Videos/Photos.
- Blog ranking is now displayed on the Author page and shows the ranking by country as well as overall in the African continent.
- To help promote other members of Afrigator we’ve created a list of other bloggers which are also displayed on the Author page.
- Search has been optimised and now displays results by Blog posts, Podcasts and News giving you the option to dig deeper into a particular section for each search result.
- The Dashboard has been redone and we’ve optimised the functionality to give you an overview of what data we’ve accumulated from your particular website.
- Added a latest news from Afrigator to the Dashboard home page so you can keep track of latest news from us.
- Plus a whole lot more…
Much needed functionality we fixed and added:
- Added a forgot password function.
- Dashboard now features a delete blog button so you can remove sites from Afrigator.
- MyGator has been de-activated until you’re logged into the site.
- Removed Top Searches tag cloud to prevent profanity and spammers from abusing the system.
- Removed individual blog post rating as it was under utilised.
What we’re still working on:
- Photos section – integrated with Flickr initially.
- RSS feeds by keywords.
- Adding Video and Photo search results to the search page.
- Arrange by Latest / Hottest / MyGator
- Preventing the system from logging you out until you chose to do so yourself.
- Performance issues and page loading times.
- Bugs, bugs and more bugs.
Afrigator Out Of Private Beta | Mike Stopforth said,
Wrote on January 10, 2008 @ 08:14
[...] a more detailed post, with a list of all the new features and things, on the Afrigator blog. Check it out! Sharing is Caring: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and [...]
Afrigator has arrived - finally! by Justin Hartman said,
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