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 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 .

For those who’d like to read previous entries on our old blog, which was powered by Joomla, please go here…

We’ve moved our company blog from the main website to a subdomain, for several reasons.

One, it’s easier to for our visitors to remember http://blog.nodesix.com

Secondly, we’re looking into promoting WordPress as a blogging platform, on top of playing around with it as an option for a full blown but relatively less complex CMS solution for some clients.

Also, the default Joomla! blog system we were using on the main site is a little limited and doesn’t give us much flexibility. Of course, we could tweak it more, but why re-invent the wheel when there’s a perfectly good blogging platform in WordPress?

Too many words.

Welcome to our new home.