Afrigator Blog

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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.

The latest addition to Afrigator is an expansion to our newly launched Gatorlove. Some of you may have noticed but a week ago we started to track all outgoing clicks from Afrigator. This means that every time someone clicks on a post on Afrigator to your website we now store that info in our database.

We’ve only been tracking click through to your site for 6 days now but we’ve already sent out 30,985 visitors to your website which proves we too want to share in the Gatorlove!

If you login to the Afrigator website and you click the View Stats link under your blog you’ll see the following brand new graph:

This graph is a break down of exactly how many visitors we’ve sent to your site on a daily basis and hopefully with time this will grow to a substantial amount.

We’re very excited about this latest edition to Gatorlove!

If you missed Nic Haralambous’ post early this morning or Stii’s a little later on then you probably aren’t aware that last night we introduced Gatorlove to the Afrigator website.

Gatorlove shows you just how much love you are getting from other Afrigator users in the Afrosphere by outlining how many blog posts and blog sites link to yours. If you login to Afrigator and click on the Dashboard link you will now see a list of your sites showing you your Gatorlove.

But, that’s not all, if you click on the Blog Posts (#) link you will see a detailed list of exactly what post is linking to you.

And then finally to top it all off you can also click on the Blogs (#) link and this will show you exactly which blog sites are sharing the Gatorlove with you.

It’s been three weeks in the making but finally it’s arrived! Afrigator Alpha-0.2 has officially been launched on our live server so head on over to see what we’ve been up to. We really wanted this release to be a big one and I think we have achieved just that. Not only have we given you new functionality but we’ve rewritten the entire aggregator and stats system from the ground up to be slicker, more improved and to allow to create new and exciting functionality.

I really want to take this opportunity to thank all in the team who made this happen but especially to Stii for his commitment and dedication to this project. Without him this would not have happened! Please also note that this site is still very much in Alpha so expect things to break - often!

Having said that though here’s what’s new on the site.

Design & Layout
Mark Forrester has been working hard on the redesign of the site and we’re now using a fixed width structure with some new design elements.

New Design

Old Design

New Features

OpenID
One of the coolest new features to hit Afrigator is the ability to login and signup using your OpenID. We are the first major site in South Africa to implement the OpenID technology and we’re extremely proud of this fact.

OpenID has emerged as the de-facto user-centric identity framework allowing millions of people to interact online by using a single login across multiple websites.

If you’re already a user of Afrigator and have an OpenID account then you’re in luck because you can simply convert your current login to use your OpenID instead and full details of how to go about doing this is posted in our Google Groups page.

Multiple Sites
With the introduction of OpenID it just made sense for us to allow you to create multiple sites under one username. We’ve introduced a new Dashboard which is a full system whereby you can add new sites to your account, get stats on existing sites and manage your Afrigator tracking code effectively.

If you were one of the unlucky ones to register multiple sites with different user names don’t fret because we have full details of how to migrate those sites into one account at our Google Groups page.

MyGator
You can now customise your viewing experience on Afrigator by using the new MyGator page. You will notice that under each post there is now a new link called Add to MyGator. If you click this link it will add that websites entire feed to your customised MyGator page.

But we realise you might want to remove a feed from your MyGator page at some stage so we’ve also given you the functionality to remove it as easily as you added it by clicking the Remove from MyGator button.

Labels
Labels are a new introduction to the Afrigator site and they allow you to really refine your content. They provide a nifty way to get information specific to your needs that the MyGator page can’t do. Once you are logged into the Afrigator website you will notice a new box called Your Labels.

You can add a label identifying specific areas of interest to you and clicking one of your labels will return a set of blog posts that contain the wording of the label in the post. Because interests vary this is a great tool for watching what people are talking about at the time of a major event or discussion.

Blog Rating
When Afrigator first launched we introduced you to Post Rating which allows you to rate an individual post between 1 and 5. We’ve now take this a step further and introduced a similar concept for rating Blog sites as a whole. You will notice a new star icon next to the Muti plugin icon.

Clicking this star will load a new 5 star rating system allowing you to rate that particular blog site our of 5.

Top Tags & Searches
Our previous Tag and Search clouds were a mess to say the least but this new version has really allowed to expand it to its full potential.

Not only do these respective clouds render much better but you can also view what’s being discussed in the Afrosphere by click on either the Today, 7 Days, 30 Days or View all buttons at the bottom of each box.

Stats
We have also undergone a rewrite of the whole ranking and stats system. From your point of view the most noticeable difference is the nifty new flash graphs that details your websites traffic.

We’ve kept the same format and report on the last 7 days, 4 weeks and 4 months worth of information.

Top Sites
The Top Sites section has gotten cleverer! Our stats rewrite meant that we changed the entire formula to how we rank websites on Afrigator. In version 0.1 we only based the rank of a website on traffic however in this new version it is based on the following criteria:

• Traffic (unique visitors & page views)
• Blog Rating
• Post Rating

All three of these elements now determine who is the best in their country. You will notice on the Top Sites page that we’ve also included a new drop down list of countries. You can select your country from the list to view who ranks highest in your area.

Technical
Stii is going to do a post later about the full technical details of this new version but we’ve introduced a lot of new things some of which I list below:

• Aggregator now uses microformats as a standard.
• We’ve been working on the migration to Python but this is not entirely complete yet.
• We’ve dropped a lot of the old AJAX stuff and introduced Mootools into the mix for our AJAX-like functions.
• JavaScript & CSS has been stripped for faster loading times and better functionality.
• Page loading time is reduced from +/- 160kb to +/- 70kb.