Ok, so I’ve been waiting for a whole week for my boss/partner to write a blog of introduction for me but seeing as I just wrote something on my own blog about being proactive, I decided to do something a little out of the ordinary and write one for myself.

Allow me to introduce myself. I am Kiztio Katawonga the new Executive Director for Nodesix. If anybody wants to know what an Executive Director does, you can click here for a general description. I have over 10years experience dealing with all manner of web things, whether Web 2.0 or Web 0 and I bring a whole host of other experiences in technology and business experience to the table. You cannot be faulted for saying I know what I’m talking about. By the way, can anyone tell me what this whole “hosting” business is about?  

I’m very excited to be here at Nodesix and we have big plans to make this the leading web applications and hosting firm in Africa. A big hairy audacious goal I know and lots of pressure on me but our company belongs to The Almighty God and He’s the guy who casually creates universes and parts Red Seas when He’s on a lunch break. So we believe it can be done.

A big and warm hello and thankyou to all our loyal customers and friends with a promise that Nodesix is only going to get better, faster and more exciting in the days to come. And to the team behind NodeSix, you rock guys, to infinity and beyond!

God bless. 

This is a small update for those Beta Testing BlogSpirit Version 2, and generally for anyone interested in news about the new BlogSpirit.

We’ve received verbal and written feedback concerning the functionality of BlogSpirit. From this feedback, we’ve noticed that:

1. Most of you would like to immediately view the blogs. This business of selecting feeds you’re interested in is not working.

2. Others however, love the ability to customise their own feeds, it gives them the control they need.

3. Some people are not getting activation emails.

4. Internet Explorer functionality is still an issue. This one we know about, but we’re working on it.

5. Adding new feeds is not as intuitive as we’d like it to be.

So, in order to move forward, we’re going to backtrack a little and change some things slightly.

1. We’re going to keep adding more blogs to the current BlogSpirit.
We had stopped adding blogs to the current BlogSpirit, because we were worried it would get too saturated too fast and we’d have too much information on the home page.

But, seeing as taking care of the issues in the new BlogSpirit will take some time, we’re going to keep adding the blogs we’ve discovered until the new BlogSpirit is ready, so be a little prepared for blog overload.

2. We’re combining the current BlogSpirit with the new BlogSpirit functionality.
The initial reason for creating a new BlogSpirit was to add some flexibility and customisation to the thousands of feeds that will eventually come up. Users would be able to follow their favourite authors instead of being bombarded with too much information.

However, gauging from the feedback, we’re better off first populating, then filtering later.

—

Winding up, if all this seems like too much jargon, worry not, you’ll see the changes in a few weeks.

Cheers!

Between 14:00HRS and 15:30HRS East African Time, our three servers were offline for critical security updates. Each server was off for approximately 30 minutes while the hardware nodes were rebooted after updating the servers.

Here is the notification we recieved from our server provider, which they sent out to all their clients:

From 11pm-8am CST(05:00-14:00GMT) tonight, we will be rebooting Virtuozzo hardware nodes. This is to perform a critical security update to the Virtuozzo software. Total downtime for each server is expected to be 10-30 minutes.

We do regret the short notice of this announcement. However, we feel the need to act quickly to insure the protection of your precious data. We appreciate your understanding, and apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause.

It’s taking a bit longer than expected, but this is what’s going on. Your server should be back up shortly, and thanks for your patience.

Please accept Node Six’s apologies for the brief time window in which your websites, blogs and services were not available, but the update was essential for the welbeing of the entire system, especially your data and services.

Thank you,

Node Six Technical Support Team

We’re creating this temporarily to get your feedback on the new version of BlogSpirit. Please let us know what your feedback, suggestions and critiques are.

It will help us greatly improve the service over time.

Thank you!

In Brief

If you’re the impatient type, here’s the gist of this post: We need a few people to help us take the application for a spin and tell us how it works or if it sucks. Head over here to register. You will recieve an email in a few days with more instructions.

In Full

First of all, I’d like to thank all of you for making BlogSpirit version 1 such a success. All the little links you’ve been putting on your blogs, the banners, the hype, the word of mouth, we appreciate. Without you, it would be just another in-house application atrophying on our computers. So, yeah, thank you bloggers, you guys ROCK!

Now, there’s some exciting news.

BlogSpirit Version 2 is almost here!

Yup, and we’re just as excited. Why?

The New Features

1. Multiuser support
   BlogSpirit now supports multiple users. This means you can login and choose which blogs you want to follow. You can also add your own feeds, not neccessarily Ugandan. Or you can just choose to view the public feed, which shows all Ugandan blogs on BlogSpirit.
2. Personal settings.
   With the new BlogSpirit, you can make personal settings that are only visible when you login. Like you can mark articles as favourites and view your favourite articles, with one click. No more scouring the web looking for that one article you liked so much.
3. Support for Tagging
   You can tag articles and posts within BlogSpirit. This will not affect the original article, but only the article database in BlogSpirit. This makes searching through blog posts a lot easier.
4. Feed Categorisation
   BlogSpirit now has support for categorisation of feeds, so you can label your categories as business, news, humour, etc and then sort your feeds into those categories.
5. Email Digest
   You can choose to have BlogSpirit deliver an email summary of the latest blog posts straight to your inbox.
6. A better feed engine.
   We moved from Gregarius to Tiny Tiny RSS, a better all round feed engine. This means updates will be faster and less sporadic.

There’s lots more in the pipeline, but first, we need your help.

Since the new BlogSpirit has much more extended functionality, it inevitably means there are likely to be bugs, features and functionality that we haven’t yet fixed, but which require real world usage to fix.

So we’re opening a private Beta testing phase for the new BlogSpirit.

We need a few of you guys to head over here and register for the private beta testing. In a few days, you will receive another email telling you how you can access BlogSpirit version 2.

In lay man’s terms, basically, help us take the application for a spin and tell us how it works or if it sucks.

Please sign up here.

Thank you!

The Node Six Team

Hello good people. It’s been a while since we updated this section. Lots of stuff has been happening, and there’s lots more coming from Node Six.

First off, welcome back from the festive season, and a happy new year to you all.

For those who have stood by us through the past year, clients, friends, family, supporters, we’d like to say a big thank you. We could not have done it without your support.

Node Six is in its third year, and we’re gearing up for some fairly massive changes to the way we do things around here. Let’s just say it’s going to be one heck of a ride.

Also, our focus for this year is going to be online applications, and especially flash based rich internet applications. To start that off, we’ll be releasing BlogSpirit version 2 for beta testing around mid this month. It’s looking pretty different from the current Node Six BlogSpirit.

As usual, the core engine is an open source tool that we’re modifying and customising to be more functional, feature rich and intuitive.

As for the rest of the applications, we plan to roll out/extend six major web applications, some of which are actually already being used. One of those products will change the way Ugandans use a certain aspect of the internet.

We can only hold our breath, and hope that you will love the products as much as we do.

After two ISPs shut down internet connections to web hosting firm McColo, the was a reduction in global spam by almost 50%. Yep, 50 percent.

To give you a comprehensible figure, shutting down that webhosting firm effectively eliminated 78 billion spam messages per day.

Probably explains why our spam filter at Node Six has not been complaining that much.

It won’t be a long term effect though, the site’s servers will be back up pretty soon. Money talks.

Interesting article from TechRepublic:

Several sources have stated that McColo Corp is the major North American host for international firms that control millions of subverted computers. Reportedly, these botnets are used to deliver spam focused on selling pharmaceuticals, designer goods, fake security documents, and worse things.

Two contracted ISPs stopped providing Web hosting firm McColo with Internet access, which immediately quieted several major botnets responsible for almost half of all delivered spam. Learning how and why this was done is worth your time.

Check out the full article at TechRepublic if you can handle the tech-talk.

We had a brief service interruption between 9:45 AM and 10:40 AM, East African Time.

The affected server was SENTINEL.NODESIX.NET.

There was an issue with the switch that powers the network for the
hardware node that our SENTINEL server is on.

A few of our websites were not accessible for the duration
of the outage (slightly under one hour).

Our server provider’s network engineers replaced the switch
and the SENTINEL server is back on now.

Please accept our sincerest apologies for any inconveniences caused.

The Node Six Technical Support Team.

We were recently contacted by Jonathan Gosier of Appfrica about doing a small interview for the Appfrica Blog. It was mostly a Q&A thing via email, but allowed me, for once, to properly articulate the stuff we’re doing and why we’re doing it.

Here’s the link to the interview;

http://appfrica.net/blog/archives/610

—

About Appfrica

Appfrica.org facilitates, mentors and incubates entrepreneurs in software in East Africa and Uganda. The goal is to offer a physical space with a solid internet connection, servers, software and computers that will allow students and recent graduates a place to develop their ideas in a constructive environment with industry professionals outside of school.

The blog at Appfrica.net is web portal for the latest news related to African web development, social media, innovation, education and entrepreneurship in other areas of technology.