Afrigator Blog

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Hello world, my name is Lester. For those who haven’t heard I’m the newest addition to the team at Africa’s best blog aggregator. I’ve been told that I’m the Product Manager for all things Afrigator, but personally I think I’ll just be the guys who takes lots of pics and blogs all the time.

The Gators recently took a trip down from our fancy new Cape Town offices to meet the team from Cape Town’s freshest T-Shirt company, SpringLeap.com. Eric and Eran showed us their cool cargo lift (very 1970’s Woody Allen) and introduced us to the rest of their team - a very cool group of people. After the obligatory mutual back packing -we’re all very, very hip after all - Eric hooked us up with some SpringLeap T shirts and tried to get us to take our shirts off in the stock room. After digging through the the (very) wide T shirt selection, we each found our t shirt soulmates and Eric then politely moved us on our way out, lol.

You can check the full Afrigator photostream out on flickr, and here are a few pics too.

Afrigator will be on the move quite a bit going forward, meeting and greeting and just generally keeping in touch. And since I’m the new picture and blog guy, you can expect lots of groovy pics and well, blog posts.

Till next time, keep well

Lester, Stii and Justin

A couple days ago we launched a new Religion Hot Topic page on Afrigator. One of the key topics we’ve noticed filtering through on Afrigator is Religion and we felt a dedicated Hot Topic page would do the job. We weren’t wrong.

Religion is our second most popular Hot Topic page and we’ve aggregated a lot of data in the last few months - here are the stats:

• 8970 Blog Posts
• 397 News Articles
• 500 Videos
• 13 Podcasts

Africans feel passionate about their religion and we’re hoping that this new Hot Topic page will fill a need that was previously difficult to find.

Along with Google, WordPress and a few others - Afrigator is now an official sponsor of BarCamp Africa.

BarCamp Africa is a chance for people from Silicon Valley to learn about Africa on many levels: the place, the people, contemporary issues, outlooks, opportunities and more and we are proud to support any initiative that encourages discussions between Africa and the developed world.

For those who don’t know a BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants and you can read some detailed FAQ’s about BarCamp Africa over here.

This year BarCamp Africa will be held on the Google Campus in Mountain View, California, USA on October 11, 2008. If you’d like to attend then book your seat now as there are only limited tickets left.

Over the last few weeks we’ve been involved in a process of migrating Afrigator to new servers hosted in the US and it’s safe to announce that this migration is now complete. A part of this process has been to split the website up into various segments so as to optimise speed and performance.

Prior to this move Afrigator was hosted on one dedicated server in Germany and we’ve had many performance issues in the past that has affected the overall user experience. As of now Afrigator is now running off four dedicated servers and we’ve split the website content, statistics and feed parsing up into three separate systems.

This now means that the main website is faster and more efficient and all our statistics now run independently from the main system. The benefit of this is that sites carrying the Afrigator tracking code will notice a faster load time on their website and the two systems don’t clog each other up any longer.

All our content parsing (i.e. when we pull your blog posts into Afrigator) is now done on its own server and once again this has vast performance improvements across the entire site.

Our new hardware improvements and system optimisation has resulted in faster loading times of the website and we now have a system that is scalable for growth.

As of Saturday we closed down the Afrigator Google Group.

The main reason for doing this was because we became increasingly inundated with spam submitted to the Google group and it was a nightmare to manage this on a daily basis.

Don’t worry though because we have made another plan for support to our users. As of today all support will now be provided via a dedicated support ticketing system. If you need support now or in the future then please visit our new support page at http://afrigator.com/support.

By filling in a support ticket we can now better track your issues with the system and we can also plan these bug fixes into our development schedule.