Hello World.

Just dropping by to give you a brief update about what we’re doing.

1. Design Kingdom
Design Kingdom Version 2 launched on 24th July. It’s bigger and it’s better. So far, the users really love it! We’ll continue to add tutorials, articles, featured artists and we hope that you will join the discussions, forums, and community.

2. Seacom’s Broadband
We were proud to be invited to the Seacom Media Launch. I must admit I was blown away by the speeds that we were able to get on the fibre optic cable. But there still remains a lot of work to be done before that speed gets to the end user. See my blog post on this for more information.

3. BlogSpirit v 1.5
As we mentioned earlier, we’re doing some revisions on BlogSpirit, and we’ll be launching version 1.5 on 1st September 2009. There’s still tonnes of work, but we’re excited at the progress we’re making so far.

We’ve also done a few hardware upgrades that should see significant improvement in performance on our servers.

So that’s it for now, we’ll be back real soon.

Stay cool y’all.

First off, some exciting news! The new Design Kingdom website goes live on July 24th!

We ( Node Six ) have been working feverishly behind the scenes to create a bigger and better online community for Ugandan designers to connect, share, explore and grow in skill and in passion.

So, we’re almost done with the new Design Kingdom website, but…

We need volunteers to post tutorials, articles, news, and generally share stuff. You can either submit your own tutorial, or send us a link to an excellent tutorial or article you’ve seen online.

You can contribute once a month, once a year, or a million times a week, as long as it’s design related, we will appreciate your contribution!

Our current focus is in the following areas:

• 3D Animation
• Web Design & Development
• Photography
• Flash animation
• Sound Design
• Video Editing
• Visual Effects
• 2D design & Illustration
• Hand drawn Art & Illustrations.

If you think you can take on this challenge, then we need you!

Send an email to admin@designkingdom.ug and I will hook you up with behind-the-scenes pre-launch access details and you can start posting cool design stuff.

Remember we’ll need tonnes of content before the new website goes live on July 24th.

We cannot wait!

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.

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

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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.

Introducing xMail Beta, get FREE email hosting from Node Six, all you have to do is pay for only your domain name!

xMail Beta is currently a promotional product from Node Six, and is open for limited beta registrations, we have a very limited number of hosting accounts we’re giving out free, so book your domain today!

For more information, head over to our website.

BlogSpirit reaches 100 Blogs!

Wow! We’ve actually hit 100 blogs on Node Six BlogSpirit! There’s something we’re working that was supposed to be ready by the time we reached 100 blogs, but then I didn’t expect it to be so soon.

Anyhow, we’re still working and we’ll be releasing it soon. Kudos to all the people tirelessly working to make it a success.

Design Kingdom goes live

Some might have seen the Design Kingdom demo, and tried it out, but it still needed some work. To do an early launch, we’ve revised layouts and content a little bit, to allow for people to use the site in the meantime. So without further ado, I give you the Design Kingdom!

If you are a designer, feel free to check it out!

PS, the rate at which Design Kingdom is updated might flood BlogSpirit, but please bear with us.

BHH (Blogger’s Happy Hour)

Went late for another BHH yesterday. Was awesome as usual, except I apparently missed out on major intarekcho discussions. I know other bloggers are better than me at recapping, so I’ll let them do it. Go Antipop!

And still on blogging, we’re at 97 bloggers on BlogSpirit! Yeah!

Rogue King

I’ve started a personal blog to talk about non-Node Six issues, stuff I’m passionate about. It’s called The Rogue King. See it here.

Go Daddy’s new look.

We use Go Daddy almost daily for domain registrations, and a few days back I noticed it was taking ages to load throughout the entire domain purchase process. Turns out they were updating their website.

Honestly, I don’t like the new look. It’s a little unbalanced (black is too heavy on one side) and yeah, the graphics are heavy. Not too sure how this will affect the domain shopping experience for some of us.

Plus everytime they do this, it’s harder to find your way around. We’ll see how it goes, might end up getting used to it (again).

Yesterday, Google launched a massive salvo in the ongoing Browser Wars, when it released a public beta version of its much anticipated browser, Chrome.

For those in the tech-world, it was simply a matter of time before the internet search and advertising giant threw down the gauntlet (again) in Microsoft’s face.

Riddled with bloatware, bugs and security flaws, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has been slowly, but steadily losing the fight for dominance in the web browser battles.

Statistics vary ( see here, here and here ), but the general consensus is, Internet Explorer is on its way out. The smaller but more powerful and more relatively secure Mozilla Firefox has long been a contender for first place, and has been steadily gaining ground.

Until Google unveiled Chrome. From all the buzz surrounding it, it may fast become the browser of choice, first among technophiles, then later, the masses.

An online comic, apparently leaked from the Google team, explains the technology behind Chrome in a fairly enlightening way. So much so that I learnt a whole lot about browser structure and processes from it. Be warned, fairly geek language.

Fueled by the comic, and the buzz, I downloaded Chrome for a first look.

The Million Dollar Question: Would it become my browser of choice?

The Simple Answer: Yes. From what I’ve seen so far, a resounding yes. But not just yet.
[ Read the rest of this Entry ]

This month, in preparation for a few upcoming products and services, Node Six completed the purchase and setup of two new servers. These servers are faster, and are situated at another data center.

We’ll be moving most of our clients over the next 3 weeks to the new servers. We expect all our clients to see a marked increase in speed and more space on their hosting services.

Over the course of the next year, we’ll be adding more servers to cater for our expected increase in clientele. We’ll also be using these servers for the development of new, resource intensive applications.

We’ll keep you updated on new developments.

“BlogSpirit” is just a working title, name ideas would be helpful.

We have a functional beta ready. The inhouse feed aggregator was not going to stand up to the stress of a million blogren logging on at once, so we’re building on another open source RSS framework called Gregarius.

http://www.nodesix.net/blogspirit/

We’ll be adding the additional features with time.

Let us know what you think so far.