What’s happening to Afrigator?
“Hot news in the SA blogosphere currently is that Afrigator.com, the Africa-centric social media aggregator, has been named one of 31 ‘hot non-US Web 2.0 startups to be watched’ by Business 2.0 magazine on CNNMoney.com” more..
I’m not so sure I agree with this anymore, don’t get me wrong, I think Justin, Mark, Stii and Mike did a fantastic job, but I don’t think it’s working nearly as well as it should be anymore. I am aware that the Afrigator beta version is coming soon though! The minute Afrigator was launched, I signed up and immediately began to feed my feeds to their site and all was good. I enjoyed seeing the other bloggers getting involved and I enjoyed their blog posts and the publicity which was created around Afrigator.
These days I find the site incredibly slow and there is no way to retrieve your password if you have forgotten it. If you type in an incorrect password, it sends you to your dashboard, displaying all the control, but saying that you have entered in the incorrect username and password and displays a PHP error. On top of this, I have still not received my t-shirt from Afrigator (7th October 2007) when they held a win a tee competition. Nic from SA Rocks delivered my tee a few days after I blogged about it and I was very impressed with him. Why did Afrigator not step up to the plate?
I want to be able to put an Afrigator support badge back on my website, but I will not do this until I actually feel as though it’s worth supporting Afrigator.
Ps. Justin.. I know you got my postal address and everything, and I know you confirmed with me, perhaps the delivery never arrived?
Christopher is the founder of iMod - Most of his time is spent building websites and pushing the limits with Search Engine Optimization. You can follow him on Twitter @ChristopherM
Chris M has written: 4156 posts.
Nov 11th, 2007 at 6:01 pm
Hi Chris
We’re always looking for feedback on Afrigator both good and bad so this post does provide some value to us.
In terms of the speed there are a couple considerations.
1) Overseas hosting. This does have an impact and we tried to look at bringing the site back to SA. Unfortunately comparative hosting in SA would have cost nearly R7000 per month so we’re forced to keep it overseas until we can get some cash to justify this move.
2) Slow loading. This is something both Stii and I have worked very hard on and for the most part this has been resolved. On the trends page I’ve noticed that sometimes the queries just time out and this can happen if you browse to another tab in your browser window and wait for it to load. For some strange reason if you navigate away from that page while it loads it can sometimes timeout.
The forgotten password issue is something that does exist and won’t change until beta unfortunately. We finally got Alpha stable about 45 days ago and we’re not touching this version again. Comparatively I’ve noticed Amatomu also don’t have a forgotten password function so it seems we’re not alone.
We will certainly look at the php errors you experienced when logging in and maybe you can email me with more specifics so we can try replicate the issue on our side.
In terms of the Tee’s this is all my fault and shouldn’t be taken as a reflection on the rest of the team or Afrigator. I just haven’t had the time to send out Tee’s to people like yourself and I know this isn’t an excuse so please accept my personal apologies.
I am trying to resolve this issue and hopefully have the Tees all sent out by end of November.
Nov 11th, 2007 at 6:06 pm
Hi Justin,
I am very aware of the hosting costs, it’s a pity local hosting has to be so darn expensive, but I cannot understand why it is still so slow? Many large South African websites are being hosted overseas, yet they manage to run. I love a lot of the features on Afrigator and just want to be able to use it basically.
I noticed that if I focus on the Afrigator tab, it seems to load a lot better than if I explore another tab at the same time. I don’t think this is only for Afrigator, as I have come across this several times, perhaps a Firefox thing?
So strange, forgotten password reminder saves support a nightmare, but I guess for security reasons, it’s a good thing. Perhaps we’ll see it in beta :)
I will try screen dump the errors for you, I can’t remember off hand unfortunately what they were, I think includes()’s perhaps, I can double check!
Tees – haha, classic, mate.. I know how it is, bloody mission getting them together, packaging, and posting, etc. I really do want the tee, but I’m mostly just pulling your leg ;)
Thanks for a great reply, if you need anymore help with beta testing and the likes, please feel free to email me and I will have a play around with the website for you guys.
I look very forward to seeing the new version!
Nov 11th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
We will see a forgot password function in beta as well as a delete site function. Both these issues are our biggest support requests so it makes sense to automate this.
In terms of speed I really have the exact opposite experience to you. I can tell you that we have zero slow queries (thanks Stii) and we’ve optimised things to load really quickly. From my side I experience a 6.4 sec load time with cache and a 24 sec load time with no cache.
Something I am noticing is a lag with the dns queries. On a telkom adsl there is like a 30-60 sec lag when querying the dns server and i’m not sure why this is happening. I don’t know if this is related to your experience but its not Afrigator that is slow in this instance but rather the communication between Telkom and the nameservers. This issue doesn’t exist on iBurst.
Another issue that could be causing speed lag is Google Analytics. We have this code in the header of the site and sometimes it can take up to 20 sec to query this via Google servers in SA. A solution here would be to move it to the footer rather than header area.
Nov 11th, 2007 at 6:32 pm
Ah fantastic. Forgotten password is a great addition in my opinion. It will make the user experience very much easier. As far as site deletion goes, I guess that’s a decent matter, I would say it’s important for your side to, it’ll keep the database optimized and also speed up the performance of the website.
Interesting about the loading, I have checked with a couple friends before just blogging about it and the general consensus was that both Afrigator and Amatomu have been performing really slow lately, perhaps it’s just all of us on home adsl ;) Let’s just blame telkom, seems like the general trend! :)
Google tracking code should be placed in the footer of your website, shouldn’t it? That is where they say we should place it. I used to handle analytics in my header tags too, but was told by a reliable source that placing it in your footer is far better. I understand the implications of placing it in the footer, but it’ll speed things up though. Give it a try I guess, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
I’ve managed to login and setup my blog again, don’t know how it was removed in the first place, but it’s setup, so I will look out to see if it’s reading my feeds.
Nov 11th, 2007 at 7:01 pm
Well Analytics should actually be added to the header to effectively track stats but if you’re not in the US then it can be an issue.
I have moved just the Analytics code to the footer because user experience is more important to me than stats.
Nov 11th, 2007 at 7:03 pm
Sorry was meant to say “just moved” not “moved just”….
Still have the DNS issue here though which is freaking me out a little but hopefully you’re experiencing a difference on some level with this change.
Nov 11th, 2007 at 7:06 pm
Ah, I used to keep mine in the header basically because websites in South Africa take so long to load, that the
The minute I click the login link, it just takes agers to load :(
I think your personal .com is down?
Nov 11th, 2007 at 7:12 pm
Yeah it is down but completely unrelated as it’s on a different server to gator… you gotta love this :)
Nov 11th, 2007 at 7:16 pm
Sounds like my life! Classic :)
I’ll keep following the progress of Afrigator and look forward to seeing the beta release!