Mark Forrester - Independent digital designer and online entrepreneur

I think that last post was a bit premature. After stating I was back I leave you guys for another 2 weeks without posting anything but an Afrigator update. My apologies.

I’m now back in the UK after a glorious holiday/work visit to Cape Town.

I chose South African Airways for my return flight to London, instead of Air Namibia, and I can’t not tell you about my excitement of having my own tv screen. It’s been far too long for me flying with carpeted walls, and a singular tv screen behind some dutchman’s bald head. What was even more exciting was the new tv channel on SAA (well new for me at least), the tail wing camera channel. On this channel you get to watch the plane take off, fly 40 000ft above the clouds, and plummit towards earth again, from outside the plane on top of the tail wing. This was a very cool interactive feature that I almost wet pants playing with.

My other bit of excitement was opening my website statistics up this morning. Somehow, posting only 2 articles this month, my web stats have doubled. Well they actually doubled last month after posting a piece on watching the World Cup cricket free over the internet. I was rated number 1 for the search “Free cricket world cup TV“. This month, after the World Cup finishing, I expected my web stats to drop to normal. They didn’t. And my new visitors were not landing on my site because of that post, well only a very small dumbass few of them (Cricket is over my friends). It was mostly thanks to links from Google Images.

So read this post I wrote a while back about “Boosting your Google Images search hits“. It’s working for me.

“It’s been three weeks in the making but finally it’s arrived! Afrigator Alpha-0.2 has officially been launched on our live server so head on over to see what we’ve been up to. We really wanted this release to be a big one and I think we have achieved just that. Not only have we given you new functionality but we’ve rewritten the entire aggregator and stats system from the ground up to be slicker, more improved and to allow to create new and exciting functionality.”

If that teaser isn’t enough to get you over to Afrigator, nothing will. Justin and Stii have been working flat out for the past few weeks and the work they have done in such a short time frame is mind boggling. I am so proud to be working with these gurus on such an exciting, first of a kind African project.

Hurry on over to Afrigator and have a play. Most importantly let us know what you think of Alpha 0.2!

Read more about the new features on the Afrigator blog.

Mark’s back, tell a friend.

Things have been quite quiet here the past few weeks. Actually let me rephrase that, it’s been more like the Gobi desert, very dry. I do apologize.

So what’s happened since I last posted. In a nutshell. A lot. I’m currently back in Cape Town, and have been here since 30 April. I flew over for my little sister’s wedding. It was a beautiful wedding. After the wedding were all the family suppers and day excursions to the Cape Town attractions with my UK family. There was also a fair amount of partying with pals, Super 14 rugby, beer and biltong. And now. Now I’m back working in the Cape Town office. Meeting with new clients, writing proposals and working on some new websites. Before heading back to UK for the summer in a couple weeks.

I unfortunately missed the Cape Town 27 Dinner by a couple days, but have caught up with a few local bloggers. Last week I met with the internet entrepreneurs behind Ideate and Yuppie Chef, Shane Dryden and Andrew Smith. Great guys with an incredible knowledge of e-commerce in South Africa. Next week I finally get to meet Mr. Mike Stopforth in person, who I have been working with for the past year on a couple projects over email and instant messengers. The joys of the internet.

So that’s what’s happened in the nutshell. Hopefully more regular blogging will resume. If you are in Cape Town and need design work done on an exciting web project please do get in touch with me. I’d love to meet up whilst I’m over here.