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.

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 ]

Yesterday was my first time at BHH ( Blogger’s Happy Hour ). I’d been planning to go for a while ever since I got an invite from Ivan, but I never really could find the time. My addiction to work many times causes me to miss out on “a life”. But this time, I vowed to make it, and boy was it worth it!

It was awesome, got to meet these really cool people whose blogs I’d been trawling in silence. And I had a good time too.  It’s amazing how you always try to put a face to the blogger, and then when you finally meet them, you realise how completely offtrack you were.

In attendance: Dee ( Darlkom) , Carlo , Mr B2B , Heaven , Chanel05 , Eddsla , Sleek n Wild , Ivan , and some really quiet guy who came with Eddsla and finally “Chanel’s housemate”.

Most people I was seeing for the first time except Sleek n Wild. We have a crazy old old friendship. I had a very insightful discussion about Japanese, business culture, Wharton business school, business leaders, innovation and work practices in Uganda with Edmund, aka Mr B2B.

And today, on other Node Six business, I met Country Boy.

These people rock.

Still on bloggers, everyday, I find a new blogger to add to Node Six BlogSpirit, but today, while waiting for a certain 3D animation render to complete, I decided to trawl blogspace and see how many new Ugandan bloggers I could find.

I’ve added 11 new blogs today! We’re almost reaching the 100 blog mark!

My biggest challenge though is filtering through old blogs, figuring out if the owners changed blogs or if they simply haven’t posted in a while. I think I’ve left out almost 10 blogs for future reference, should they resurrect.

Small appeal to bloggers, if you know any blogs out there that aren’t on Blog Spirit, please let us know.

And lastly, it’s amazing how much is hidden right in our midst. Presenting The Uganda Skateboard Union - www.ugandaskateboardunion.org