Afrigator Blog

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.

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.

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.

This is a final call for entries into the Parlotones Competition where you and your partner can win a dinner with the band. Read this for entry details.

You only have until midnight tomorrow the 31st October to enter this unique competition. Don’t be shy – any type of entry is acceptable and you can enter as many times as you like. The more the merrier.

What are you waiting for? Get cracking!

A couple weeks back Rohan Strydom made contact with us to see if we might be interested in assisting The Parlotones, arguably one of South Africa’s most successful rock bands, to launch their new wine – Giant Mistake.

Normally we wouldn’t get involved in something like this however, since we’ve been piloting and testing our new “social stream” functionality (see the one we did for the US Government) we figured this might be a good opportunity to roll one out for The Parlotones.

Last night saw the launch of the new Giant Mistake wine by The Parlotones and with that we’ve launched our social stream which tracks the conversion that is happening around this wine. Have a look at the screenshot below and click here to view it in action.

Through this social stream we are now able to track mentions across Twitter, Afrigator, Flickr, YouTube and Digg. We’ve also introduced a new feature to the stream that is able to track fans of The Parlotones. At the moment fans only work on Twitter but we’re looking at expanding that to other platforms in the future.

On Monday morning we’ll be publishing some exciting news for all you Parlotones groupies so watch this space for the big announcement.

This has been an exciting project for us to be involved in and with it we’ve managed to evolve the social stream even further. We hope that you guys find it useful and if you have an idea for another social stream then let us know!