May08
14
Afrigator Beta 2 - What Do You Think?
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 postsWith 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…
Mike - I think everyone involved has done a fantastic job! The dashboard customization feature allows users to really ’streamline’ and micro-read (at a quick glance) who or what they want to follow and get updates on. It really sifts out things that you may not want to ‘work through’ to get to your favourites. the stats section seems to be a lot quicker, unless I’ve had really bad bandwidth issues beforehand (hey anything’s possible). so i don’t have to sit and open a few more windows while i wait for stats to load - they’re there on my dashboard and if i want more in-depth stats, they load quickly.. the design is simple, effective and neat, all of which i like, so all in all, personally I feel great job done to the guys!
A big well done to the whole team….first point is that the loading time is awesome now (it was getting pretty sluggish) love the stats - v cool as well as the customisable dash. Very nice - Well done and congrats!
Thank you, Mike for the kindest words, but that ain’t true! We all planned this carefully and had numerous… uhm… “debates” around the features, so credit really goes to everyone.
@Michelle and @Melissa, that makes my heart go warm and fuzzy to hear those words… Thanks Michelle for the great overview! And yes, I worked my butt off once more to try and improve the speed. Seems it is better, which is satisfying!
We really appreciate the time you guys take to give us feedback and if there is anything else, please just shout!
Great to see people commenting on the faster loading interface. Stii and me spent some time tweaking code, tabbers, css and images.
Here in the UK, on my first world broadband connection, it was even getting sluggish, but it seems heaps better now.
BTW Mike you need to make your blockquote font darker. Have to squint to read it.
@Michelle, @Melissa, thanks for the feedback - I must confess that I agree
@Stii no getting warm and fuzzy on my pixels, please
@Mark thanks pal, will do so
Nice upgrade guys, am enjoying seeing Afrigator mature. Two small things I noticed..
1. “Top ranked blogs” and “Most visited blogs” are the same lists. Is that coincidence?
2. A change to the behaviour of the link on each post’s title, where currently the link href is “void(0);”. Because of my surfing habit of opening links in a new tab by clicking with my scroll wheel, I do that on these links expecting the post to open in a new tab. Instead I get a blank tab. I think this is confusing because there’s no visual indication that clicking on these titles will open an excerpt with the link to the full post.
So I would change the href on these links to the full post URL, and then use JavaScript to reveal the post excerpt as it currently does but also return false so the link doesn’t fire. This also means that the full posts are still accessible if JS isn’t available.
Hey Coda,
Thank you much. Great idea so I did as you suggested so check it out.