Then I was yanked back into the business side with Justin going on a sabbatical. I’ve completely forgotten what it was like making business decisions and sorting out accounting queries, while at the same time still juggling the normal development work and trying to improve support and communications. I’m basically back to working 18 hour days as in the early Afrigator days. Then, on top of it all, I need to keep the kids from killing each other as it is holiday time on top of it all.

Now you might think I’m complaining, but you’d be wrong! I’m kind of strange that way (though I’m sure I’m not alone). The more I have to do, the more I get done and the other way round. I’m enjoying it. I’m even some of the more mundane tasks like bookkeeping. I’ll admit, I’m fairly rusty, but fortunately experience is something that is not simply lost. It all comes back to you a lot quicker than you’d think.

I won’t lie, there were some days when I wanted to run away from my inbox. I’m not the most efficient emailer in the world. Thanks to Gmail’s Priority Inbox I was able to keep on top of it fairly well. Lifesaver feature that. I’ve even made a point to start blogging with renewed vigor again. Half asleep and just before I hit the sack, but it gets done! Since I’ve started slacking on the blog side, I’ve always had this niggle that I’m neglecting something very, very important. You know that feeling. Actually, I forced myself to do it for Adgator and experience kicked in again and once more I’m into it.

I’m forever the student. Learning new things is my thing. Here is a great lesson I can learn you from this experience:

Communication is @#$@%^&* important! Extremely, utterly, crucial. Therefore you need to do it. Even if you think you suck at it, just do it. It is a lot better saying something than nothing. At the very least it is a start of a dialog and through a dialog you can solve a problem.

The good news is that all is good on Afrigator now. All blogs that are using some form of Pubsubhubbub service will be realtime in no time.

If you’re running on WordPress (not WordPress.com) and you have not yet installed PuSHPress, please do so soon!

If you are using WordPress.com (i.e. yourname.wordpress.com) your good to go. If you run your own installation of WordPress, I strongly suggest that you install the PuSHPress plugin. Why? Here is a good couple of reasons:

1. It get you more exposure. Your latest post would be published immediately. This results in your content being distributed as they’re published instead of hours later.

2. It saves you bandwidth. We don’t need to check your entire feed every hour. We sit back and wait until you publish a blog post.

3. We’re not the only ones doing it. Other services and aggregators also uses Pubsubhubbub. Services like Friendfeed, etc. Which means you’ll save even MORE bandwidth and your content would be even more realtime.

Okay, I’m still having issues with Blogspot blogs. They use a Google Appspot application to enable the realtime publishing of their feeds. However, when I try to subscribe at pubsubhubbub.appspot.com it always returns a 500 Internal Server Error and I’m not sure why. I tried setting various headers as I thought that maybe it is because I’m using a Python script to subscribe, but to no avail. I checked using the service Hurl and that works every time without fail. I’m a bit frustrated and lost. If anyone have any ideas, I’d welcome it.

A lot of services uses it nowadays and it is gaining traction. If you’re on blogger/blogspot or wordpress.com you needn’t worry about it as they have already enabled it for those platforms. If you are on a self hosted wordpress blog, I suggest you check out the awesome wordpress plugin called PuSHPress. Install it now! It would be worth it ;)

Oh and here is a video explaining it in a cool way.

Note: I’m going to churn quite a bit of posts to test our Afrigator implementation of Pubsubhubbub.

Photo credit: http://mcfarlaneusa.wordpress.com/

In my opinion, there are two ways newspapers can monetize their online offering.

The first obvious way is advertising. Yes, it may not rake in the cash the same way that print ads did in the past, but that does not matter as it would bring in a little money and it would greatly influence the second choice.

The second option is through a subscription model. Before you get your knickers in a knot and shout “dumb idea, would never work!”, hear me out.

Gerd Leonhard often says:

Stop trying to sell the copy. The copy is worthless. Sell the things around the copy.

This is why a subscription model might just work, but news sites would have to get very, very clever. They would have to build services around news that would make people pay for the service. Sorry, but the news on it’s own is simply not enough. How would they do it? I have a couple of ideas. I’ll keep them to myself for now, since, well, some of it will be implemented in Afrigator in due time, so be patient! One feature would be to remove all the flashy ads if a user subscribes. Making the first option (ads) complimentary to a subscription model, won’t you say?

I love The Hub and the concept behind it. It is a step in the right direction and it is a very real experience that could possibly enhance your news consumption. It would be possible monetize at some stage.

Maybe if the papers do it clever enough, they could release full feeds instead of partial feeds so we could try and build onto the value add… Just a thought. What do you think?

“There are people who have an MBA and there are people who have an MBA. It’s something people in SA don’t want to hear but it’s very different studying at a local school and studying at one of the world’s top universities. If you want to do an MBA, go to one of the well-established institutions, otherwise you’re wasting your time and money.”

(Photo credit: Tech Central)

It is just a pity that they did not have a class in Common Sense. After the Twitter PR disaster and more recently the article on Tech Central in which he states that he “prefers fine wine to bloggers”, I thought I’d lay out a couple of facts.

Let me start by stating that my decision to acquire an Apple Mac can directly be contributed to 3 prominent bloggers. Mike Stopforth, Dave Duarte and Justin Hartman. Today I own 2 Macbooks, 1 Mac mini, 1 iPod Touch and 2 iPhones. If I’m not mistaken it was Mike, Justin and myself that also tipped Mark Forrester‘s decision to buy an Apple. (Mark, am I correct in saying this?) I can think of a number of bloggers that has invested in Apple Macs and I think I’d be safe to say their decision was greatly influenced by their peers [read: bloggers].

Thats all good and well, but let’s face it, these couple of sales won’t buy RJ an year’s supply of fine wine. Hardly. So I turned to Afrigator and extracted a couple of statistics regarding bloggers and Apple:

“Apple Mac” 3372 blog posts written by 754 bloggers.
“iPhone” 7552 blog posts written by 949 bloggers.
“iPod” 4344 blog posts written by 1242 bloggers.
“OS X” 1272 blog posts written by 520 bloggers.

Not quite so insignificant. Consider that the average Apple user tends to vigorously defend the Apple brand whenever anything is said or whenever Microsoft Windows gets a bit too much exposure. I wrote two bashing Windows 7 posts just last week. RJ, money can’t buy this. Just to put it into perspective:

“Windows 7” 845 blog posts written by 207 bloggers.
“Windows Mac” 1474 blog posts written by 551 bloggers.

Consider that Windows 7 is probably the best operating system ever to be released by Microsoft and Snow Leopard the biggest ball of fluff by Apple, I’d say it would be common sense to nurture the relationship with your product’s greatest fans, wouldn’t you? Instead RJ prefers fine wine.

Sure, one can argue that the internet does not reach much of their target market. If you’re a garden gnome. Tell me, how many articles was written about Apple in the last 12 months in traditional media? This many? I doubt it. What makes it even more significant is that this is unpaid word of mouth marketing. Yes, RJ, unlike you, we don’t get paid to write. When we say something about Apple it is an honest opinion. Thing is, our words carries a lot more weight with some of our readers and friends than your paid writings ever will. EVER. Should I say it again just for extra effect? Okay. EVER!

RJ, here is the best advice you’ll ever get for free:

Put on a pointy red hat, a fake beard and register under the name Fizzcrank Fullthrottle for UCT GSB’s Nomadic Marketing course. It may be worth much more than your MBA in the long run.

A lot have been said about the parties involved, but I think I should just highlight what a clever guy Rohan is. A year ago he was a programmer at MIH SWAT and he left to start his own consulting business. He overheard that Kahn from The Parlotones always wanted to have his own wine and that got the gears spinning… He brought them together with Steve Straker from Hands on Wine and 12 months later a Giant Mistake was made. (I love the name! It plays so well.) In other words, we have an IT guy who made a dream come true. Who said we were boring?! Rohan, dude, stay as you are and remember, this is only the start…

Rohan also got Afrigator involved in the project and we did a Social Stream for them to track all the activity happening on selected Social Media channels. Have a look over here.

Well done to everyone involved in this project and thank you to the Parlotones for a great party!

My giant mistake? Havin way too much of the Parlotones’ Giant Mistake!

Check out Justin and Chris’s overview of the evening:
http://justinhartman.com/2009/09/17/the-parlotones-make-a-giant-mistake/
http://imod.co.za/index.php/2009/09/16/private-performance-by-the-parlotones-at-cape-grace-cape-town/

To alleviate load off the system and data transfers, you can do a HTTP conditional GET which basically check the RSS feed’s HTTP headers to see whether or not the feed was updated since the last time you checked and if it was, you’ll process the feed, else just ignore it. It does this by checking the ETag and Last-Modified-Date HTTP header attributes. It also only fetches the headers and not the entire feed, so only a fraction of the data is retrieved.

...
req = urllib2.Request(url)

req.add_header("If-None-Match", etag)
req.add_header("If-Modified-Since", lastmodified)

opener = urllib2.build_opener(NotModifiedHandler())
url_handle = opener.open(req)

if hasattr(url_handle, 'code') and url_handle.code == 304:
    return
else:
    headers = url_handle.info()
    new_etag = headers.getheader("ETag")
    new_last_modified = headers.getheader("Last-Modified")

    if new_etag != None and new_last_modified != None:
        store_new_etag(new_etag, new_last_modified, self.id)

    #get the content and write to file
    content = url_handle.read()
...

If you’re interested to know the more technical aspects of what happens, see this brilliant post. If you plan to build a feed reader at all, you need to use this function. You will not only kill your bandwidth, but everybody else’s if you don’t use it. If you built your own blogging platform, you need to make sure that you add the necessary ETag and Last-Modified-Date headers to your RSS feed. Will tell you next time how to do that. If you are on WordPress, Blogger or Movable Type it should be fine.

We had our fair share of “Blegh, another Twitter clone…” and we expected it. The thing is, we love twitter! Always have, always will.

So why did we clone it then? Simple. Some of the reasons Justin already covered over here, but I’d like to add that Afrigator was in need of something social networky. We needed to add a communication dimension and as everybody knows, there is no better way to do that other than Twitter. Yes, we could have leveraged off the Twitter API. That is true, but the Twitter API is not without it’s limitations.

Besides that, we also have a few other ideas, such as Twitter recently killed SMS functionality in Africa, and it left a huge gaping gap in that market.

We did not leverage off some Open Source app like Laconi.ca or Jaiku. We wanted to initially, but due to the fact that we want to seamlessly integrate Gatorpeeps with Afrigator and add a bunch of unique features, we thought it best to rather develop our own flavor into the mix. For those interested, it is backed up by the brilliant Kohana PHP framework :). Was it the best idea? The right thing to do? Time will tell.

Now the real work starts. Now we need to do all these promised features and integration… Fun times!

Afrigator seems to be quite fond of gymnastics in their rating of blogs.

Basically, The Gay Kenyan complained that one night he noticed that his ranking dropped suddenly into the fiery pits of Beelzebub. He went from 48th in Kenya to 271. He was deeply shocked by this. He is not the first or only person who complains about this. On the Blogs24 network, we’ve seen countless complaints.

Better I explain this, but before I do, let me say that they are not wrong. We’re not necessarily doing it right. In fact, I’ll go as far as saying there is not really a wrong or right. It is just the way we are doing it at the moment.

We’ve got an Afrigator ranking script that we run every 4 hours. (To find out exactly what the Afrigator ranking script does, see this post: Whats in an Afrigator ranking) Thus, every 4 hours, we calculate a new “score” or rank for each blog in our system. Effectively this means that the ranking can change every 4 hours!

In addition to that, we reset the Unique Visits and Page Views ranking every Sunday night round about midnight-ish. So, if you had a fantastic amount of visitors this week, next week they don’t count anymore as we start afresh.

In order to maintain a good ranking position, you need to constantly (at least on a weekly basis) have a steady flow of visitors to your site. If you have any suggestions regarding these processes, please feel free to tell us. We’re always open to suggestions! ;)