Never before was there a better excuse to grow a moustache and get away with it. It’s the month of Movember and you guys should be aware that you have a right, nay a duty to grow your moustache. And no-one can stand in your way either – not your boss and not even your angel (nor your gay lover). Because you have the best excuse ever – it’s to raise awareness for Men’s health issues, like testicular cancer.

I’ve decided to extend his challenge and will give 5 male bloggers each a very limited edition Movember tshirt if you:

a. Grow one of these:

b. Blog about your contribution.

c. Link back here or leave a comment with your post on Movember.

Don’t worry if your facial hair is as sparse as mobile phone coverage in Africa. It is all for a good cause, time to support it mates! Do your bit.

PS. I’ll blog the tshirt design as soon as I’ve got it. Give me a mo-ment, please.

I’ll admit to this: It won’t be a mainstream model any day soon. It is a little harder than I initially thought and I do all the post markups by hand. People without fair HTML and CSS knowledge will not cope at all. We can always work on some WordPress plugins to streamline the process!

As for this blog, I’ll do it the way Nic has done it. Using the simple, quick to publish Prologue2 theme to do Twitter-like updates. I do like that. Also, I’m changing the flow in that random pics and photos won’t go to pic.stii.co.za anymore, but everything gets drawn here. One blog to rule them all!

I’ve spent enough time musing and fuming about this. Everyone for himself and the devil for us all. Enjoy it, else you’re not doing it right!

(this is a great, great album by Pantera, BTW)

The problem is, if you continuously hit people in their face, 2 things are bound to happen:

1. People will see it coming and duck the next blow.

2. Keep it up long enough and people will ignore you or start to avoid you.

Either way, you are not going to achieve your desired goal. So the next time before you hit someone in the face to get their attention, rather try and talk to them instead of about them. Talking about them, when they are in the same proverbial room as you, is nothing but a vulgar display of power. Just a thought…

The first round of pinging is now available. If you have written a new blog post, you can go to Afrigator, log in and in your dashboard ping your blog to get your post into Afrigator straight away. Our Gator parser takes longer and longer nowadays to run through all feeds. Currently it takes about an hour and it is just getting longer and longer as the number of blogs on Afrigator increase. Jump the queue why don’t you? We seriously encourage it!

From time to time our parser falls over and get uptight like a sued blogger and may ignore your feed. Well, now you can flip the Gator parser a bird and take matters in your own hands and see to it that your blog IS updated.

Please do note that it is NOT a silver bullet. If there are something buggered with your blog’s feed for whatever reason, it won’t update Afrigator. At least you would know about it straight away and can jump on our case for help!

So here is how it works:

Log in to Afrigator and go to your dashboard.

Underneath your blog screenshot there are four buttons:

Hit the last one that says: “Ping blog”
Thats it! Simple as pie. Just let us know if there are any issues, mkay?

WARNING: The pinging might run a little long. That is completely normal.

One more little thing…

You would be happy to know that it is now built in. When you log in, you have the option to be remembered. If you select to use that option, you will stay logged in for a long, long time. At least until you log out again.

PLEASE NOTE:

• Do not use this function on a public computer! If you do, the next dude will have access to your Dashboard and who knows what clever things they’ll get up to. To be safe, remember your login credentials rather.
• Also, it will only work on the computer and browser you logged in from. We’re striving for brilliance, but we’re simply too human to have overcome that one! ;-)
• You will stay logged in for a couple of months. You might be logged out in the far future, fortunately if that does happen and you forgot your username and password, you can always have it reset by using the forgot password function.

Anyways, thought you should know! Its a stupid little thing really, which we should have implemented ages ago, just never did.

He did raise some very interesting points:

According to Hofmann, the “most glaringly obvious result from this research is that we are looking at a very small, white, wealthy and educated community, who have the time to actively pursue a hobby which takes up a large portion of their day.

That should be the real shocker! Consider how much bloggers earn compared to the average salary in SA and I’d say we have a big problem… There is not much opportunity for growth in this sector.

Should we not rather ask the question how we are going to bring blogging to the lower income masses, rather than the upper income elite?

Next year there will be a new field on your tax return called Blog URL(s). Don’t dare to lie about your income if you’ve got one or more…

So far here are what some other bloggers have been sent:

Rafiq was sent “How many years have you been blogging for?” :

Chris Mills was sent “Which city/town is closets to you?”:

Justin was sent “How much money do you earn each month from blogging?”:

Quirk was sent “Which of the following do you use to drive traffic to your blog?”:

Now I have been sent “How many hours a week do you spend blogging?”:

What is quite fascinating is that quite a big percentage of bloggers spend more that 5 hours a week blogging. I myself spend a good amount of hours doing that, if I’m actively blogging that is.

Also, what I find kinda interesting was how well planned the slides was sent to strategic bloggers. It could be coincidental, but I doubt it! Justin got sent the money slide while we’re busy setting up Adgator. Quirk got sent the traffic source slide. Clever young fella this Alistair! ;-)

By the way, should you want to keep an eye on this topic, you can follow it on Afrigator – Blog survey. I suspect that a lot more will be said after Monday when the whole shebang is released.