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!
We’re on a mission. A simple one, but a very important one. You see, I’m the forgetful type. I can’t really remember things too well and I figure that there must be loads more people like me out there. So our mission is to help people like me by making it as easy as possible to sign up or sign in to Afrigator and GatorPeeps.
The key to making this as easy as possible is to limit the number of login details that one needs to remember. For instance, if you have an Afrigator account, you won’t need a separate account to log in to GatorPeeps. Things are already simpler, which makes hamster brains like me feel a bit better. And it’s pretty useful for you guys too.
So, how do we make this even easier? The most obvious way is to let you use details you already know without needing to commit any new information to your precious memory. You can now join or log in with your Google, Yahoo, WordPress, Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, Open ID or Flickr details. Personally, I think this is pretty nifty!
So, how does this work?
Here’s a 60 second run down of how to join or log in with your favourite web site’s login details:
If you have any questions, queries or thoughts – please drop us a line below.
There was one more thing that I wanted to mention, but I can’t remember right now. Maybe later…
Afrigator and 24.com, Africa’s largest blogging platform, today announced a partnership that allows seamless integration between the two platforms.
For a couple months now we’ve been working hard with the 24.com development team and today the fruits of all our labour have finally come to fruition. This new integration means that anyone who has a blog on the 24.com platform can now click a single button and they will automatically be signed up to Afrigator and will start to receive detailed stats about their blog.
We’ve also created a skinned 24.com version of Afrigator that allows users of the 24.com network to view ranking, latest blog posts and newest members within the community.
We’re not ones to gloat* but we just had to share the recent stability report for Afrigator.com. Since June 2008 we’ve been using a third-party server monitoring company, Pingdom, to help us monitor our servers’ stability and uptime on the Internet.
Afrigator runs a complex infrastructure spanning across four servers so it is critical that we are notified if one of them goes down. While you only get to see one website each of these servers makes the whole thing tick and we’re continuously trying to improve stability for your viewing pleasure.
As you can see from the graph below our overall uptime for January 2009 across all four servers was 99.99%. Only one of our servers had any downtime and in total Afrigator.com was inaccessible for only 23 minutes during the entire month.
This is a big feat for us as we’ve experienced some considerable downtime in the past yet despite massive growth the last few months our code (monkey) and servers are handling it all quite well. Have a look at some of the historical downtime we’ve had below.
* Technically we do like to gloat but this just sounds better. Doesn’t it?
Following on from the success of the November campaign, we’ve decided to give you another shot at getting your mits on 5 SpringLeap t-shirts in the December AfriGreater competition.
This month’s question is a little sticky, but we’re big boys here at the Gator Pen and sometimes you need a little cold truth to help you make progress.
So, this month we want to know:
“What about Afrigator seriously ticks you off?” What’s your pet peeve about the site (or us for that matter).
The reason we want to know is simple – we love Afrigator, and like proud parents we often have a hard time seeing the faults in our pride and joy. So we’re asking for an impartial view (that’s you) to help us make things better. And don’t worry, we know that when you tell us what you don’t like, you’re only doing it to help us (just don’t add “this hurts me more than it hurts you in your post, lol).
To enter your blog post for the December competition, all you need to do is use the words “AfriGreater December” in your post and we’ll find it. So while we’re all a little nervous at the thought of what might be coming our way, we know that once we know what’s not working we can fix it up and get that much close to becoming the best blog aggregator in the world.
