It has required a lot of careful planning and many hours of hard graft, but I am very proud to announce the new release of Afrigator. Afrigator Beta 2 is packed full of awesome new features including:

• A completely re-worked home page.

  The new home page is far more engaging with a neat, light tabber that allows you to display the most recent posts, the most clicked posts, the latest posts by popular bloggers, and a tab that you can customise to display only specific categories from particular countries, e.g. Tech content from South Africa.

• A more user-friendly MyGator.

  The MyGator functionality is not new, just more evident and more usable. To follow a blogger simply login, then visit your favourite blogger’s profile page and click the “follow this blog” button. MyGator allows you to follow only specific bloggers on a dedicated MyGator page. Everytime a blogger who you follow publishes a post, you see it on your MyGator page – not buried under a few hundred other posts.

• A much neater, faster, more usable interface.

  I’ve spent many hours submerged in the css of Afrigator, specifically fine tuning the grid structure and content styling. We have opted for what we believe is far more legible typefaces for the headers and general content – Helvetica and Arial. We’ve also changed line-heights, cell padding, paragraph margins, header sizings, and colour contrasts. We are using JQuery and some custom javascript to get the tabbers and toggle buttons working. Toggle buttons? That’s right, instead of opening each post individually, you now have the option to expand or collapse them all at the click of a button.

All that and a powerful blog ranking algorithm that calculates all sorts of interesting facts about individual blogs, and some African blog statistics that might interest you.

To read more about the new features head on over to the Afrigator Blog or go straight to Afrigator and play around. Constructive feedback would be most appreciated.

A huge shout out to Stii for his countless hours of development late into the nights and his calm, collected manner in which he responded to my constant nagging over bugs and svn queries!