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 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.

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

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.

Hello good people, good to have you here.

The blog post is a bit long, but please take the time to go through it. Thanks.

This is a followup of sorts to a much earlier post we made concerning bloggers in Uganda.

As Node Six, our mission is to bring the power of the internet to as many Ugandans as possible, allowing them to use it to build themselves and their businesses. Our first step towards fulfilling this mission, is to provide affordable hosting, easy domain registration, develop affordable (and relevant) websites and build internet applications that are relevant to the local audience.

We’re huge fans of bloggers and blogging, especially Ugandan bloggers. Our collective blog bookmarks are upwards of 500 blogs, articles and posts, ranging from politics, to technology, to sports, to business, to just general hap life. Plus, the rate at which we keep discovering new Ugandan (and Kenyan) blogs every other day, led us to develop an inhouse blog aggregator to keep track of new blogs, posts and articles. More on that later.

Now, for the reason why we’re here.

Again, we would like to iterate our support for the blogren, in one way or another, since they are the most obvious example of the advent of Web 2.0 in Uganda. Our first request was concerning a custom hosting package. That didn’t get much of a response, either because our blog was still too new on the net, or simply no one was interested

But, we did get a response from Ivan and Jackfruity (Rebekah). Ivan invited us for the BHH, I went, but failed to trace the group, either I was too early or misplaced. Rebekah has been in contact, and she mentioned a collaboration with Node Six concerning the Blogger’s Awards. We’re still following up on that.

Point is, we seriously want to help. So here’s what exactly what’s brewing in our tech hot-pot, specifically for bloggers.

A. Blogger’s Community ( Working name “BlogSpirit”)

Building on our in-house feed aggregator, we can extend it to provide a rudimentary blogger’s community, with the following features.

1. A feed aggregator for all known Ugandan blogs, so you can see at a glance, from one site, who’s updated their blogs and go straight to the new post.
2. A customisable area for your favourite blogs, with an option to add a new feed.
3. A Blogger’s photo gallery. It’s been mentioned at  numerous blogs, so we figured it wouldn’t hurt to put it up somewhere.
4. Blogging resources section. We can post tips on custom design, widgets, installation, customisation, migration, templates etc
5. Whatever useful tools you guys can suggest would be welcome

We’re already in the final stages of a similar community, but for Digital Artists, powered by WordPress. You can check it out at designkingdom.ug The content is still dummy text though, with the exception of the Iron Man article.

B. Blog hosting

Yeah, we’re not giving up on this one

Seriously guys, we’ve noticed a lot of the time that some blogs are not very available (petesmama and slybard come to mind) and comments get chewed up on blogger and sometimes even wordpress. We know, we’ve tried.

On the few blogs hosted by us (2weakdudes.com, elementaledge.com, and designkingdom.ug) stuff seems pretty stable. Or maybe I’m assuming too much. Since 2weakdudes.com is the most visited of the three, can you guys tell us if you’ve had issues there?

Besides, we think having your a personalised domain name is much better.

Basically, we want to make getting your own domain and hosting as simple, hassle free and as cheap as possible, even if it means giving away free hosting. Dead serious. More on that later.

Here is a package we proposed to Ivan to share with the blogren a while back.

nx-Blogger: 10,000/= per month (making it 120,000/= per year)
-15 Email Accounts
-500 MB Space
-2,500 MB Bandwidth
-20 Virtual Emails
-1 Database
-Your own Domain Name free for 2 years (depending on availability)

We’ve since revised our offering to the two options below:

Option 1. nx-Blogger: 10,000/= per month ( 120,000/= per year) with Free Hosting

- 30 Email Accounts
- 1 GB  Space
- 2,500 MB Bandwidth
- 50 Virtual Emails
- 2 Databases
- Free domain name for as long as you host with Node Six.
- Banner Free hosting
- You get full access to your hosting control panel
- File Manager
- FTP Access
- Node Six technical & design support

Option 2. Free Hosting & Domain Name

- You get the same stuff as above, minus the price tag, but you’d have to provide at least two standard IAB ad banner spaces on your blog. These ads will be powered by Node Six adVantage, our new advertising network. (See below for details)
- To qualify, you would need to have at least 25 page views per day, which I’m sure most of you already meet.
- You would actually get paid for blogging. Details are below.

Please note that both options are tentative suggestions. We’d love to get your feedback.

3. Node Six adVantage (Advertising Network)

This particular one is open to everyone, but we’d like to give bloggers and selected content providers a first opportunity.

Here’s how it works.

We have content providers/providers on one side (bloggers, portals, sites, etc) and advertisers looking for maximum exposure on the other side. Node Six adVantage connects the two sides. Our ad server stores client info and content publisher info. It also stores the banners in different IAB standard formats and sizes, and distributes the banners to the advertising zones on the content publisher’s website. It also tracks statistics so both client and publisher can login to their control panel and see which ads have been loaded to which sites and how frequently.

The ads are loaded randomly, and are very highly selective, meaning we can choose specific clients for specific websites, and we can prevent one banner appearing more than once on a site.

How you get paid ( and how we get paid as well )

We charge a client everytime a banner is loaded, but we break it down into thousands of impressions (Cost Per Mille, CPM). An impression is everytime a banner is loaded.

Example:

If we charge 50,000/= per thousand impressions (CPM), that means cost per impression (CPI) is 50/=.

If your site gets about 25 page views per day (meaning 25 complete pages are loaded everyday), then you get 25 ad impressions for that day.

If you have visitors on 26 days (for most blogs, weekends normally have slow traffic so we can safely combine those into 1 day, for calculation purposes), that means you have 25×26 = 650 impressions per month.

650 impressions means adVantage bills 650 x 50 = 32,500 /= per month.

Revenue sharing is done on a 60/40 ration. You, the content publisher gets 60%, Node Six gets 40%.

That means for the 650 page views per month, you get 19,500/= per month and Node Six gets 13,000/= per month, which pretty much takes care of our server and administrationoverheads.

So in essence, you get paid for blogging and if you’re on the free hosting option, you get free hosting.

Now, 19,500/= might not seem like much, but I’m sure most of you get more than 25 page views per day. If you hit 100 page views per day, you can get 78,000/= per month. Hassle free. Well, of course you’d have to keep blogging, right? Of course.

Please note that Node Six adVantage works with free hosting, paid hosting, Blogger or WordPress.

Interested? Here’s how you can join

1. Get hosting from Node Six or keep your current blog at Blogger or WordPress
2. We need to track statistics from your blog for at least 3 weeks, so you’d have to send us an email, and we give you a piece of code to put in your template. You can choose to either put an invisible banner, or an almost invisible banner like the one on 2weakdudes.com (below the feedjit widget).
3. After the 3 weeks, we’ll be ready to evaluate your qualification for the free hosting, and/or to begin deploying the ads.

That’s it. Quite wordy, but please let us know what you think.

Thanks!

—-

Benge Solomon King

Founder

Node Six

We have a couple of exciting announcements.. First, we’ve added subdomains to all packages except nx-Micro. Then we’re moving our blog to a subdomain, and lastly, we’re unveiling our Sandbox.

Sub-domains

We’re very excited to finally be offering our clients sub-domains on their hosting packages. Many of you have been requesting for sub-domains for a while now, but we always make sure we are able to deliver and support a feature before we offer it to our clients. So for us to be able to offer a value added service at no additional cost means we firmly believe we’re heading in the right direction.

The Node Six Sandbox

The Node Six Sandbox is a place where we’ll be putting up working versions of some of the cool projects that we’re working on in-house. Think of it as a window to our geek lab.

Node Six Sandbox Projects will mostly be web based applications. Some of them will exported for desktop use, or whatever crazy ideas we come up with.

Below are a couple of upcoming sandbox products which will be released to the general public as alpha preview versions. Please note that they are currently using production code names.

Pathfinder
A visual directory system for Uganda businesses. Powered by Flash, PHP, mySQL and massive legwork.

Design Kingdom
An online designer’s resource featuring design, visual effects, 3D animation, film, web development etc. For Ugandans, by Ugandans. Powered by WordPress, mySQL, PHP and humans.

If you would like to be added to the list of alpha and beta testers, (basically you get to find out about the public releases first and also get exclusive info on upcoming releases), please subscribe to our newsletter .