Afrigator Blog

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At the beginning of the month we launched our next version of the Afrigator Mobile website and I’m pleased to announce that we’ve just launched an optimised version for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch.

If you’re an iPod Touch or iPhone owner you can now get all the latest Blogs, Podcasts, News and Videos direct on your device and as with our standard mobile version all you have to do is visit Afrigator.com. Our browser detection software will pick up what device you’re accessing the site with and will automatically redirect you to the appropriate location.

You can view more screenshots of the website over here.

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.

Today we’ve officially opened up registration for our next major release of Afrigator. This Beta version is a big release for us and we’re changing a lot of things to really encompass social media better. I don’t want to say more right now but if you’re interested in getting a sneak preview of this version then visit our Beta registration site.

Registration is only open to the first 50 users and we’re hoping that together we can turn social media on its head…

A special thanks goes out to Mark @ The Yellow Llama for sharing his ajax script with us!

I’m very pleased to announce two new features to Afrigator which Stii made live this morning. In the top navigation bar you’ll now see a new tab called Blog Trends.

This new feature allows you to view detailed reports on the blog trends across all of our blog sites registered with Afrigator in two and a half months we’ve already sent a total of 891,379 clicks to African Blog websites.

The second new feature we’ve made public is the Afrigator Twitter channel. If you’re a twitter user simply visit the Afrigator page at http://twitter.com/Afrigator and you can subscribe to receive one story per hour to either your cellphone, website or instant messenger.

There are some really cool things coming up in the next few weeks which I simply can not wait to tell you all about but in the meantime hopefully this will quench some of your thirst.

If you’re interested in finding out more check-out Stii’s post here.