Afrigator Blog

Hi all, it’s Lester here from the Afrigator team.

First, some news:

1. I still can’t get my email to work at the new building. It’s driving me insane, so now I’ve gone back to using a million labels and filters in Gmail. I think that it’s finally time to admit defeat, sad as it may be.
2. We can like to have an uber stylish (yet slightly useless) coffee table in the office. It’s a pretty little thing, but personally I’m too scared to look at it funny, let alone put a cup on it. Bull, meet china shop. The almost-cool coffee table also came with a slightly creepy chair and when you use the two together, it kinda makes the place look like a mental ward. See what I mean?

Anyway, back to business. Many of the upgrades, tweaks and fixes shown here were requested by you in our AfriGreater campaign, and for this  – we thank you. We’re still working through all of the great ideas and suggestions that AfriGreater brought in to the light and once we’re done with them, we’ll ask the smart people we know (that would be you) what they think and how we can make things even better.
Afrigator has some cool new features and fixes
Stii has been a busy, busy Gator. As Afrigator’s self professed Code Monkey, I think I can safely say that Stii rocks. Here are some of the cool new things that Afrigator can do, as well as links through to Stii’s blog, where can read a bit more about the new toys.

Tag, you’re in it.
The tag cloud is back, and I personally am quite happy to see it back on the Afrigator front page, The tag cloud will let you know what’s hot in Africa right now. Popular tags appear larger and in a different colour to the regular ones. Stii will also be working on making the cloud country specific, so that you can see what’s happening in your country at a glance.

Say what?
The Gator will be learning some new languages soon, so that you can get all the info you love in your own language. Yup, the translatino process is (slowly and painfully) underway and we’re looking forward to the day that we can present you with a fully translated Afrigator that everyone can use in their mother tongue.

Do you remember?
Apparently, Ginkgo Biloba helps improve your memory. In our case, Stii improves Afrigator’s memory. The next time you log in to Afrigator, you’ll see that you now have the option to be remembered (though we can’t guarantee ‘fondly’). If you select to use this option, you will stay logged in for a long, long time. At least until you log out again.

Ping!
In blogging terms, a ping is a mechanism by which a weblog notifies a server that its content has been updated. In other words, it lets your blog tell us when you’ve got new stuff. Afrigator now has it’s own pinging functionality. If you have written a new blog post, you can go to Afrigator, log in and in your dashboard ping your blog to get your post into Afrigator straight away. This means that you won’t have to wait until the Gator gets around to your blog to see if there are any new posts. It’s jumping the queue, but in a good way

Find your friends on Afrigator
So far, this is the feature I’m happiest to see back on the gator. You can now search for bloggers by name using the Afrigator search field. This used to be one of the standard features on Afrigator, but it got lost while out buying milk one day. The good news is that it’s back now (and that it works).
I really hope that I’ve listed everything that’s been updated and improved (but I’m sure Stii will remind me if I’ve left anything off). As always, we’d love to hear your ideas on making Afrigator an even better service, so if you have any nifty, cool or simple ideas that we can use, please pop a comment and let us know!

Till next time, keep on blogging.

Lester

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