Mike Stopforth

So as usual I’m the last person to get around to posting that our little project has grown up again.  But then again I’m the only person who really works for a living

Charl Norman scooped the launch announcement this morning, and Justin updated the Afrigator blog with a list of cool features the new version boasts.

Here is a summary of those improvements from the Afrigator blog:

1. The home page has a new layout. We have 4 new tabs which sort posts by Recent, Most Clicked and by Popular Bloggers. We also have a new tab called Custom which allows you to filter posts by category.

2. We’ve also added MyGator to the home page which will hopefully futher filter posts by your personal preferences.

3. To activate the custom tab you have to login to the system and click on the Customise Homepage link in your Dashboard. You can then select the countries or categories that you’re interested in.

4. Below each blog post on the site you can now click a small Stats icon which will show you where a particular blog is ranked in their respective country as well as in the rest of Africa.

5. We’ve add an Expand/Collapse button so you can easily see descriptions for all of the posts on a page.

6. On the News page you can now sort news articles by most recent or popular.

7. On all the pages we now have an Ajax pager that improves loading time and speed to users so you can view older content easier.

8. We’ve also improved the display of posts. You can now easily see the name of author and date of their posts which we dropped for Beta 1 which in hindsight was a bad idea.

9. There is an improved profile page for a user with link a to Mygator as well as some stats about the Author’s blog.

10. Our Blog Stats algorithm has received a MAJOR overhall. We now calculate a blog’s position based on the following four criteria:

a. Visits
b. Pageviews
c. Links from other Afrigator blogs
d. Links from other Afrigator blog posts

With these 4 criteria we then add these together and divide by 4 to get an average. You’ll notice in the sidebar we now have “Top Ranked Blogs” and this list as well as the blog stats page is ranked according to this average. We believe this is a far more accurate way of ranking blogs.

The blog stats page also allows you to view ranking of blogs by visits, page views, links and country.

We’ve really spent a lot of time on making this work.

11. On the Customise Homepage link in your Dashboard you can specify which country or countries’ content you want to see on Afrigator. Only blog posts, podcasts and new are filtered at this stage. (Not stats or videos)

12. You can now also override country filter in the sidebar. You can use this to see something from a specific country and override your settings as per your personal preferences setup in the Dashboard.

Our primary focus throughout the design and development process (all credit goes to Mark and Stii for the hard work) was making the site more appealing to it’s faithful users.  Truth be told, Afrigator has always been a good idea executed in a not so brilliant way (at least from a functional perspective).  These new features start to drive us in the right direction, I think.

The key is, what do you think?  Honestly…

This is an unbelievable story that Bronwyn Patten from Dell South Africa sent through to me the other day - thought you geekier types might appreciate it.

If you look very carefully you’ll notice that the Golf is actually leaning, along with the people inside…

Ok so I’m kidding but heck, what a phenomenal photo…

After suffering the tragic loss of Ashley Callie earlier this year it’s good to see that the Isidingo production team and cast still have a sense of humour…

Stop posting for 10 whole days.
Use a boring generic WordPress theme as a placemarker while you take too much time redesigning your site.
Stop replying to comments.
Use all the free time you have over two consecutive long weekends to become a better Texas Hold’em player, instead of keeping track of what’s happening in the blogosphere.
Ignore Twitter [...]

Ok so it’s been a long time coming but my blog design has needed a serious refresher. I’m in the process of doing so right now, so excuse the current bland-ness. This should only take a few days

I’d noticed that I’d become progressively less and less interested in Facebook over the last month or two. A bit like LinkedIn - which I discovered, indulged in, enjoyed, and then subsequently forgot, Facebook had somewhat lost it’s luster. From being the first thing I checked the first moment I got online, I [...]

Gino Cosme, a colleague of mine at Cerebra, has managed to do what I so desperately want to do but lack the fortitude to accomplish - he’s not only published a free Introductory Guide to Social Media for download, but he’s keeping it regularly updated.
Gino is a huge asset to Cerebra as our account director. [...]

A few weeks ago Susan Shabangu, deputy safety and security minister, came under fire for her comment at a police imbizo when she encouraged police officers to shoot to kill criminals, or more directly - “kill the bastards”.
Family friends of ours are currently spending their days and nights in ICU at the Glynnwood hospital next [...]