Afrigator Blog

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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.

Some of you must have noticed some recent downtime with the Afrigator website and I can assure you this has given us serious grey hairs. While not trying to bore you with specifics I think it is necessary to say that we had performance issues with our database server due to the search function on the website. As a result we have had to omit searches containing 3 characters or less from the site as the queries are simply way to intensive on the site.

The good news is that not only has this issue been resolved but we’ve also introduced some interesting database caching mechanisms and our overall improvement of the site has increased dramatically. We haven’t benchmarked the increase in performance yet however the site is noticeably faster to end-users.

We’ve also managed to get rid of most of the duplicate entries on the Afrigator site due to an issue we experienced last month so searches are now more accurate and the results on the site should be more relevant.

There are some very exciting things in the pipeline coming out in the coming weeks and I really can’t wait to announce these new features. There is no doubt that our next major release will be our biggest one yet so watch this space.

Mark @ Jumping Bean has just launched a Drupal module for adding the Afrigator tracking code to your Drupal-based site. You can view his original post here.

We don’t have any way of testing this mod for Drupal so if any of you have success with it please let us know so we can include it as an official plugin for Afrigator.

So we’ve seemingly been quiet about new developments on Afrigator however it’s not because we aren’t working like mad! This past month unfortunately has been dedicated to problem-solving and we’ve spent a lot of time optimising the Afrigator system for better performance as well as working on stabilisation.

At the moment we have 965 sites signed up and processing these feeds on a continuous basis has proven to be a huge learning curve for both Stii and myself. As a result we’ve redone the entire feed fetching and parsing process and we’ve migrated completely to Python for this process as PHP simply could not cope with it.

Stii has a really good post on this development which highlights some of the frustrations we’ve gone through in trying to achieve this but I’m pleased to say that almost three days later we’re now stable and Python is working like a charm.

I must take this opportunity to thank Stii for all his hard work on this. It wasn’t easy to achieve but he was absolutely amazing during this process. I also want to thank Neville Newey from Muti who, without pay, really helped guide us in the move to Python. Thanks Neville, we now owe you big time!!!

So the net result of the last months’ work is that we’ve redone our queries to the database server, moved to Python for all the hard work and optimised the server to run faster than ever. There are still some small niggly issues which we need to sort out but we’re almost there and new features should start hitting the live site in the next couple weeks.

UPDATE: The downtime has been scheduled, please see the times below.

Over the last few days we’ve been having some issues with the dedicated server that powers Afrigator. We’re trying to problem solve the root cause of this issue as the server essentially freezes every 16 hours or so and only a manual reboot gets us up and running again.

This problem is getting progressively worse and this evening, 26 June, we’ll be running a full hardware test on the server to see if we can identify any hardware flaws that need to be addressed and/or replaced.

The server will be shutdown between 21:30 this evening and 09:00 tomorrow morning.

We apologise in advance for any inconvenience caused by this downtime however it is a very necessary process to allow us to continue providing the service you’ve come to expect from us.