Afrigator vs Regator

So, by the looks of things we’ve (Afrigator) been somewhat, sort of “copied“. Honestly, I don’t mind it as much. In fact, I feel quite flattered! That’s to say if the Regator crew even knew of our existence. Lets be honest, a gator is what a gator does. Not sure, but it would be somewhat stupid to put a fail whale as a mascot when the word gator appears in the domain name.

The color scheme, well, gators live in swamps and swamps aren’t blue! Unless I’m completely color blind, that green looks nothing like our green. Just to prove the point here are our greens in good ol’ hex: #CDE855 #A7C520 and here are Regator’s: #95C564 #336324 The numbers are way off if you ask me!

Good for them that they’ve drummed up all three of the holy tech trinity to review them! (ReadWriteWeb, Techcrunch and Mashable) In all honesty, I’m a tad jealous of that… Then again, you have to keep in mind that they’re launching into the wild while we’re an African service. We all know that Africa is seen as the “Dark Continent” and often get overlooked by our bigger counterparts on a regular basis. Kudo’s to RRW / Marshall Kirkpatrick who not only did a piece on us, but also (if you can remember) acted as a judge at this year’s SA Blog Awards! We love ya RRW!!! (I’m an XL, should you feel like sending me a tshirt…)

As far as concept goes, I see it as totally different. Regator is more of a 9rules Network style service while Afrigator is a kind of Technorati like service, only more location based with a couple more bells and whistles. Vast difference there.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m NOT unappreciative of the support in the comments section of the holy trinity and on some blog posts**. Gosh, I’m actually quite dumbstruck by the passionate support. Thank you guys, I do appreciate it! I’m just trying to be realistic about it. I should probably be a bit more upset and protective about this issue, but then I’d lie. If we have been deliberately copied it just goes to show that Africa had a good idea someone else wanted. Not a bad thing at all! (Although, I do share Rafiq’s sentiments a little there…)

**Here is some more on this issue:
Regator Looks Mighty Familiar - Mike Stopforth
Regator.com steals our brand - coincidence? - Justin Hartman
Shocking: Regator rip off Afrigator - Nic Haralambous
Regator - Perfect example of how Africa gets used - Rafiq Phillips
Regator steals Afrigator’s brand - Mark Forrester

Filed in: Afrigator by: Stii

3 comments

Don’t pirate music/movies! You might be forced to use Windows if you do…

I read this article today where it is said that the administrators of EliteTorrents have lost the battle against the MPAA. The guy got a 10 year sentence as he did not plead guilty and decided to fight. Now a jury decided he’s gotta go away for a while… Shame!

Two of his colleagues did plead guilty and both were given a fine of $3000 and a five month prison sentence. Heavy, but not as heavy as this:

“I had a meeting with my probation officer today and he told me that he has to install monitoring software onto my PC. No big deal to me; that is part of my sentence,” he wrote on his Lost and Alone blog. “However, their software doesn’t support GNU/Linux (which is what I use). So, he told me that if I want to use a computer, I would have to use an OS that the software can be installed on.” The monitoring software in question is only available for Microsoft Windows. Neither Linux nor a Macintosh running OS X would be an acceptable platform.

SHIT!!! That’s just plain cruel and inhumane punishment! That is more like a death sentence to a Linux user. Heavy… Don’t pirate software or you’ll be FORCED to use Windows. How much does THAT suck?!

Here is the full story.

Filed in: Linux by: Stii

4 comments

Pike > Python?

I’ve started reading the Pike tutorial tonight out of pure curiosity and something that struck me was their comparison to Python. Now in all fairness, I don’t think they’re trying to say that Pike is actually greater than Python (sorry, the title is a bit misleading), but they are making some bold statements! Keep in mind that I’m a bit of a Python fanboy.

Programs written in Python look very different from Pike programs, but Python and Pike are similar when it comes to ideas and use. Python is more widely used and has more libraries available. Pike on the other hand is faster, has a more advanced type system, and has better support for object-oriented programming. Pike’s more C++-like syntax makes it easier to get started with for programmers who know C++, C or Java.

Now, I’m in no position to say this is true or not. I’ve only started reading about Pike tonight. Here is an example of Pike’s syntax.

int main()
{
  write("Hi there! What's your name?\n");
  string name = Stdio.stdin->gets();
  write("Nice to meet you, " + name + "!\n");
  return 0;
}

Not sure I really like it, but wth, PHP looks much worse at times!

If there are anyone out there that has worked with Pike before, it would be quite interesting to hear your opinion! It does seem Pike is not as well supported as Python / PHP / Ruby…

Filed in: Programming by: Stii

3 comments

Using Twhirl for FriendFeed

With Twitter forcing us all to use everything but IM, it is a good idea to look into Twhirl. Not only does Twhirl update Twitter, but you can set it so that it updates Pownce and Jaiku at the same time (See : Impressive Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce application). Now, you can get FriendFeed updates as well. The UI is just so sleek! It is simple to leave a comment. Simple to post something to FriendFeed. I’m loving it.

I’m not sure if this was available in Twhirl version 0.8.1. I first saw this in version 0.8.2, so it might be a good idea to upgrade to the latest version. I was going to make a screencast to demonstrate how to enable and use it, but fortunately Maria Reyes-McDavis did me the favour of doing so already! It is still very awkward for me to do screen casts :). Check out the video if you’d like to see it in action.

Filed in: General and sometimes Rants by: Stii

2 comments

Being anti-social SUCKS!

A lot of my friends have said lately that they’re all burnt out on Social Networking. How tired they are of every new service, blah blah blah. These past couple of weeks I’ve been down and out with the obligatory winter bug that corrupts our systems every so often when this dreary season start and it was exceptionally tough to debug this round.

Nevertheless, I seem to have swatted the buggers, but in the process I was feeling pretty much anti-social in the online sense of the word. I abandoned plurk, avoided Facebook and did not have much to write about other than how shit I feel, so I didn’t blog here, nor on Tech Leader. Twitter still isn’t much of a problem as they’re doing an outstanding job themselves in limiting my Twitter consumption.

It sucks. Although I had more than regular contact with my flesh and blood buddies, I missed all the geek-speak and babbling we normally do online. You’d think that with all those other things not distracting you, you’d be 10 times as productive. Sorry, WRONG! I’ve grown very used to be distracted by all the other things so I’m constantly searching for something… Its like “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for” all the time. Okay, to be fair, it could have been the bugs that had me down… Seriously though, why would I want to work without all the distractions? Its not that much fun anyway!

Over the past couple of years, my attention span has become, uhm, flexible. I get tired after reading the first 140 characters of a book. Therefore, I read 3 or more books at once, 140 characters at a time. Works like a charm!

Anyways, guess what I’m trying to say is, I’m debugged and stable and have a backlog to catch up with!

Filed in: General and sometimes Rants by: Stii

2 comments

Example using XFN and Optimus to find friends on Afrigator

This is actually a new feature on I’ve implemented on Afrigator, but it could prove to be quite a handy thing on a lot of other social networks. It is always difficult when you sign up with a new social network to find your “real” friends. You either have to search for every one of them or you have to browse through a friend’s friends to try and find them. It was really easy and simple to implement, so I cannot see why more of these kind of features won’t happen. It would be quite cool to see this in something like Blueworld… hint, nudge, wink…

A special thanks to Optimus over at Microformatique and the super talented Dmitry Baranovskiy for taking the parsing headaches out the way.

We as bloggers almost always maintain some form of blog roll. This blog roll carried little value to yourself as the only people who ever benefits in terms of back links are the people on there. This has changed. You can now use your blogroll to find your friends on Afrigator. The only condition is that your blogroll links must be marked up according to XFN standards. That might seem daunting or scary, but if you use the brilliant Wordpress platform, it is a breeze actually! (I’ll demonstrate in another screen cast)

For more information on how to do it and how it works, see this video:

Using XFN to find friends on a Social Network from Stii Pretorius on Vimeo.

Just a quick note, its not as simple to make a screen cast as it seems! This is my first attempt and hopefully it will improve in time.

Filed in: Afrigator, Semantic Web by: Stii

1 comment

Optimus, the ultimate Microformats parser

While I was writing my most recent Tech Leader post, I stumbled upon Optimus, a Microformats parser brought to us by the guys over at Microformatique.

In my humble opinion, Optimus is the best you’ll find out there by far! All you do is pass a url of a web page to it, and it will return all selected microformats in either XML, JSON or JSON-P. It utilizes a mix of XML, XSLT and PHP to obtain the required results.

What is specially cool about it is that you can use it as a web service from http://microformatique.com/optimus/ or you may download the source code and run it on your own server. It requires PHP5 as it uses the DOMDocument class and the XSLTProcessor class.

Supported Microformats are:

1. hCalendar
2. hCard
3. hEntry
4. hResume
5. hReview
6. hListing
7. hAudio
8. xFolkentry
9. adr
10. geo
11. xfn
12. votelinks
13. rel-nofollow
14. rel-tag
15. rel-license

To try it and check it out, head over to http://microformatique.com/optimus/. Enter a blog address like mine and you should at least get a couple of rel-tags or XFN’s

Filed in: Semantic Web by: Stii

1 comment

Please support UnitedForAfrica.co.za

A project born from the recent Xenophobia crisis in South Africa. Please help and support this initiative by reporting incidents you know of. You can also find out who needs your help and how you can assist.

UnitedForAfrica.co.za is a mashup of incidents with Google Maps. There are also timelines which tells the story of how it spread.

SMS your name and area to 31864 to donate R10 to the TAC (Treatment Action Campaign) an organization worthy of your support.

UnitedForAfrica.co.za runs off the Ushahidi backbone which was created by Erik Hersman (WhiteAfrican.com) around the time when the election violence erupted in Kenya last year. Quirk eMarketing took initiative and they implemented the engine for UnitedForAfrica.co.za. Special mention goes to Tim Shier and Rafiq Phillips who are driving this initiative. Well done guys! Keep up the good work.

Filed in: South Africa, Web 2.0 by: Stii

1 comment

Afrigator Beta2.0 - Lets amplify the Xenophobia issue

I’ve been feeling pretty shitty these last couple of days about this issue. A feeling of great sadness and helplessness. All we seem to do is talk, talk, talk about the issue, but actions speak louder than words and talk seems cheap. I feel a bit better now that I saw how many bloggers feel the same and how many are actually putting action to words!

We launched a new feature last night, which was supposed to be developed and released a little later, but due to this current atrocity, we’ve decided to overturn schedules and bump it up the priority list. We released Topics, which is a filter feature based on very specific topics. For example, in this case, it is the Xenophobia issue that is dealt with. It will filter all new blog posts, podcasts, news articles and Youtube videos that is relevant to Xenophobia in South Africa. Go check it out here: http://afrigator.com/topics/xenophobia

We’ve made a special banner at the top of Afrigator pages to link to that page for now, just in case you are wondering how the hell you get there!

You can also read a little more on the Afrigator blog, with some interesting stats and observations! Read it here: http://blog.afrigator.com/2008/05/22/xenophobia-in-south-africa-how-were-helping/

Just want to extend a special thanks to The Times for giving us permission to use the photo by Simphiwe Nkwali as the header image!

Filed in: Afrigator by: Stii

4 comments

What can we as bloggers do about the Xenophobia crisis?

I mean, look at me, I’m all the way down here in George. There is no problems down here! Yet, yesterday was hands down the most depressing Monday I’ve had in a long, LONG time. Although I’m not close to the atrocities happening, it affected me emotionally. Mainly due to my good friend Gregor’s post being the first one to read on a Monday morning.

So I just read Mike’s call for help. Mike is so damn right. We’re all sitting on our asses behind our computers and saying things like “shame, poor foreigners” [sic] while we do the sum total of zero. Great bloody help that is, hey?!

I’ve though of this idea for a long, LONG time now, but I do not have a clue how to instigate such a thing, nor do I have the know-how of how it works. My idea is to have like a trust fund, NGO or something to which bloggers/technology people can contribute to financially. I’m more than willing giving money to any organization, but it would be nice to do it collectively as an organization I believe in, like this blogosphere I belong to. I do know that this is a fairly touchy subject and might well be a shitload of work, but I’d like something like this to happen!

Every now and again, there is a call for help. Not only in South Africa, but the whole of Africa. Yes, we can spread the word, sure, but it feels a little empty and sounds hollow. The Xenophobia crisis, the Zimbabwe/Mugabe crisis, the violence after the Kenyan elections, it has all been covered pretty well by traditional media. I’ll do my bit in spreading the word, but would love to do more and more so doing something more substantial. A great example would be the million man march which was mentioned on SA Rocks! not long ago and took place on the 13th of March. I would much rather donate some money towards their financial needs than pay an airline and some accommodation establishment just to be able to attend it!

So Mike, I’m throwing the ball back at you. You’ve got way more business savvy in your little finger and you are much better connected, so see if you could organize something like this? Nic, Justin and Gregor, I know you guys feel passionate about current affairs, maybe you could come up with some ideas? Maybe the Quirkstars or the Ideaters or the Capitalist Punks or the Stormhoekers, etc… Instead of organizing SA blog awards to get some recognition for bloggers, why not do something substantial and worthy?

If sponsors could be so easily obtained for Wordcamps, Blog awards and 27dinners, surely this should be simple? How about it?

Filed in: Blogging by: Stii

22 comments