Afrigator Blog

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Four months has gone by since we launched Beta 1 and we’ve just made our latest version live on the Afrigator site.

We’ve focused a lot of our attention on usability, functionality and most importantly relevance and below is a list of some of the key new features we’ve introduced in this latest version.

1. The home page has a new layout. We have 4 new tabs which sort posts by Recent, Most Clicked and by Popular Bloggers. We also have a new tab called Custom which allows you to filter posts by category.

2. We’ve also added MyGator to the home page which will hopefully futher filter posts by your personal preferences.

3. To activate the custom tab you have to login to the system and click on the Customise Homepage link in your Dashboard. You can then select the countries or categories that you’re interested in.

4. Below each blog post on the site you can now click a small Stats icon which will show you where a particular blog is ranked in their respective country as well as in the rest of Africa.

5. We’ve add an Expand/Collapse button so you can easily see descriptions for all of the posts on a page.

6. On the News page you can now sort news articles by most recent or popular.

7. On all the pages we now have an Ajax pager that improves loading time and speed to users so you can view older content easier.

8. We’ve also improved the display of posts. You can now easily see the name of author and date of their posts which we dropped for Beta 1 which in hindsight was a bad idea.

9. There is an improved profile page for a user with link a to Mygator as well as some stats about the Author’s blog.

10. Our Blog Stats algorithm has received a MAJOR overhall. We now calculate a blog’s position based on the following four criteria:

a. Visits
b. Pageviews
c. Links from other Afrigator blogs
d. Links from other Afrigator blog posts

With these 4 criteria we then add these together and divide by 4 to get an average. You’ll notice in the sidebar we now have “Top Ranked Blogs” and this list as well as the blog stats page is ranked according to this average. We believe this is a far more accurate way of ranking blogs.

The blog stats page also allows you to view ranking of blogs by visits, page views, links and country.

We’ve really spent a lot of time on making this work.

11. On the Customise Homepage link in your Dashboard you can specify which country or countries’ content you want to see on Afrigator. Only blog posts, podcasts and new are filtered at this stage. (Not stats or videos)

12. You can now also override country filter in the sidebar. You can use this to see something from a specific country and override your settings as per your personal preferences setup in the Dashboard.

These make up only a small list of what we’ve done so enjoy your time exploring and playing with the new and hopefully improved version of the site.