Administrator's blog

The nominations are in for Uganda's Best of Blogs Awards 2008 and Citizen Uganda is in the running for Best Design award this year. (Much thanks to whoever nominated CU). It was a great bit of news to finish off a week that brought record traffic after a glowing review on Global Voices.

Google ads may seem like an easy way to make a little money off your blog or your site, but those webcrawlers cannot always put two and two together. This is a shot of the Monitor website today. Given what is going on in Kenya at the moment, now may not be the best time to advertise a study abroad program in that country.

Keep that in mind.

A little bit of context: It's not that this guy has anything against Canadian designers. It is just that he was speaking to some people from Design Africa, a trade development initiative of the Trade Facilitation Office Canada and its African and Canadian partners.

This past summer I was in Toronto for a couple of days, and saw an artist working on a chalk drawing on the sidewalk. His work was impressive, so i guess it was a matter of time before someone approached him for a marketing gig.

I am a big fan of great design, and I wanted to do something to promote the efforts some Ugandans are making to bring great looking sites to the web. So every month, if I see something great, I will applaud it here. And if I see something horrible, I will call that out too. I wont see everything though, so you are welcome to recommend a site you know and love, or hate.

Best Site: Node Six

For our regular visitors, the store front has been quite here this week, but we have been working feverishly in the back to bring you some new content and a better user experience along with it.

One of the things that many readers have requested in the past week is a way of finding out who writes for citizenuganda.com, and where else they can be found on the web. Well, we are now exposed for everyone to see and feeling quite vulnerable about it too, so be gentle.

The upgrade to Drupal 5.3 is complete. This being our first upgrade, the drama was inevitable. There was a moment when everything was wiped off the database. This was followed by panic, yelling, blood letting and self-flagellation.

Thankfully the restoration process went according to plan and the site was back up in less than half an hour.

The development of a blogging community usually has a couple of stages. In the first stage, bloggers discover the power of the medium, particularly its ability to help them distribute their ideas. The second stage is when the community begins to attach the same importance to presentation as it does to expression.

Hi,

on Saturday morning at 7am (PST) I will be taking the site down for a few hours. I know, I know, I hate to do it too, but it will be necessary for the changes I have in mind.

The primary issue is to see if I can get the site to render correctly in IE6, or as I call that elder browser, the web developer's ball and chain. I know it's not nice to denigrate the work that has been done by lots of people over the years to make this browser what it is today, but look at what it is today!! Not standards-complaint. Thanks Microsoft.