Afrigator Blog

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As of right now you can access an optimised version of Afrigator on your mobile phone and you don’t even need to remember different URLs. Just visit Afrigator.com on your mobile phone and you’ll automatically be redirected to the mobile site.

This is the second version of the mobile website we’ve launched and from here on in we plan to develop the mobile platform as vigorously as we have the main website.

We’ve integrated Blogs, Podcasts, News and Videos into the mobile site and we’ll be adding more features as we go along. For now we just wanted to give users a fast-loading interface that contains all the relevant social media in one place. Click here to see more screenshots of the interface.

If you have any ideas or suggestions on how we can improve the mobile website please let us know!

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:

1. New website design and user interface.
2. 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.
3. News section aggregating major news sites in Africa.
4. Blogs section with new interface.
5. Podcasts section that displays only podcasts from around the continent.
6. 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.
7. All main sections now feature categories. We categorise each item automatically and this allows for better filtering of content on the website.
8. Blogs section contains a breakdown of blogs signed up by country.
9. New Top 10 Posts is featured on the Blogs page and is calculated by clicks out to each post.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. Brand new Author page has been created which shows an Author’s latest blog posts, podcasts and soon to be Videos/Photos.
13. Blog ranking is now displayed on the Author page and shows the ranking by country as well as overall in the African continent.
14. To help promote other members of Afrigator we’ve created a list of other bloggers which are also displayed on the Author page.
15. 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.
16. 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.
17. Added a latest news from Afrigator to the Dashboard home page so you can keep track of latest news from us.
18. Plus a whole lot more…

Much needed functionality we fixed and added:

1. Added a forgot password function.
2. Dashboard now features a delete blog button so you can remove sites from Afrigator.
3. MyGator has been de-activated until you’re logged into the site.
4. Removed Top Searches tag cloud to prevent profanity and spammers from abusing the system.
5. Removed individual blog post rating as it was under utilised.

What we’re still working on:

1. Photos section - integrated with Flickr initially.
2. RSS feeds by keywords.
3. Adding Video and Photo search results to the search page.
4. Arrange by Latest / Hottest / MyGator
5. Preventing the system from logging you out until you chose to do so yourself.
6. Performance issues and page loading times.
7. Bugs, bugs and more bugs.

We’ve only realised now but it seems as if our contact page has been bust for the last while. If you’ve recently sent us mail using the contact form on this blog then chances are we haven’t received it yet.

We have now fixed the issue with the contact form but if you’d like to you can also email dudes@afrigator.com to make sure that we get your correspondence.

Humble apologies for this error!

With the launch of Beta we’ve found ourselves overloaded with requests and changes so it comes as no surprise that we completely missed this milestone.

On the 28th November we passed the 2 million figure for clicks to bloggers websites from Afrigator. This means that since 16 June we’ve sent you more than 2 million hits which averages out to around 12,121 clicks per day to the Afrosphere.

Last night, at the 27dinner in Johannesburg, we launched our private beta version to the 50 or so people that remained after Eskom decided to do some load-shedding.

We are very excited about this version and I’ve included a copy of our presentation below so you can get a feel for where we’re going with Beta.

| View | Upload your own

Nic also took the following video of the presentation:

You can view the Beta version here and we’d love to get feedback (good or bad) from you. We’re only going to take the Beta site over to the live server once we’re happy with everything and have implemented some additional changes and fixed all the remaining bugs.

Looking forward to getting peoples impressions of this new major version.