As some of you may have noticed, DK has been offline since Friday the 21st, last week. The reason for this is we have discovered some serious security holes that have made DK vulnerable.

As such, we have taken DK down for some mojo maintanance and upgrading which we cannot do while it’s online.

We ask for your patience and to keep checking back. We promise you when we’re back up, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the improved site.

In the meantime, please keep doing excellent design work that we can later share and profile on DK. If your an artist and feel your work is awesome enough to be our next featured artist, send us your portfolio to andrew@designkingdom.ug

And remember the Alamo!

The Design Kingdom Team.

So, we are looking for fresh young talent to fill two positions to help us bring to light our exciting new projects.

1. Web Interface Designer
   First up, we need someone with exceptional creative thinking, a passion for Ironman, Star Trek type interfaces and possibly even Picaso. You will be working on small beautiful “brochure sites” as well as large community facebook killers. So you need to be good. Really good.

   Required skills: excellence in Photoshop, HTML, CSS, Flash and good animation skills. Knowledge of Jquery/ Mootools, Joomla and 3D techniques is a definate plus.

2. Web Applications Developer
   We need Neo, “The One” someone passionate about code, some one who can make a website toast bread and feed it to you! We need you to make fancy lightboxes and ajaxy components that make people go “Whaaat?” We need some one who can look at a code problem and fix the issue while balancing a burning tadoba on your head. We need the One!

   Required skills: PHP, Javascript, CSS, HTML, Ajax, Linux, Jquery/ Mootools, Joomla, Drupal, MySQL. Knowledge of cakePHP, ruby, DOM, Hosting enviroments, Converting Photoshop psd to working sites is again, a definate plus.

We’re not rigid on experience. You only need Skill, talent, self motivation, eagerness to learn and most of all unbridled passion are more important to us than grey hairs. We care about integrity, professionalism, team work and innovation.

Interested parties send us a copy of their portfolios and resumes latest June 18th to jobs@nodesix.com.

Node Six Team

While the older version just listed all the latest blog entries from all the blogs in our database, version Koi Koi does more than list. Its features range from a funky shout box to a members only area. In between we’ve got a chat area (where y’all can just go and chill while catching up with one another) plus an archive section just in case you were in Kanungu and had no access to the internet Additionally, we shall also be able to bring you up to date news from in and around Blogville, so stay tuned!

On a lighter note, you will have noticed the funky codename we chose, thus we are looking to get GNL Zamba to endorse our Koi Koi. Perhaps, for his troubles, we shall hook him up with a blog and introduce him to the awesomeness that is blogging. So, if he is your personal friend, give us a shout

If you notice any bugs or feel that we did not cater for some of your needs in the latest version, please do not hesitate to give us a shout in the feedback area. We would love to hear from you as we work on rolling out an even better and more interactive version.

So go ahead, blog some more and for those of you without blogs, see what you are missing out on. If you would like to get your own blog, give us a shout at Node Six and we shall be there for you all the way as you begin to take your baby steps in blogville.

Till then dear blogren. ciao

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.

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!

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. 

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!

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

It will help us greatly improve the service over time.

Thank you!