Hot of the press Pirate Radio Soundtracks. Three of the hottest cds to be released this year! Get them all now!

To celebrate the launch of our new website, we’ve designed a Pirate Radio t-shirt.

We are giving away 10 of these groovy geeky fashion items.

We’re looking for comments, feedback and constructive criticism of our new website and blog. What are the things you would change? How could we improve it? How do you like the design and structure?

Post a comment or even better, create a pingback/trackback by linking to this post.

We’ll review all the feedback by Friday the 18th and select the best ones.

I updated the Hotspot page. It’s now a bit shorter, simpler and more to the point.

You’ll notice there are now three Frogspot options:

• Frogspot Access Point
• Frogspot ADSL – 384Kbps
• Frogspot ADSL – 4Mbps

Get a Frogspot today, be a part of Frogtropolis…

This is the second part of a 9 part look into the secret headquarters of Frogfoot Networks. Lets peer into the bosses’ office as well as check out the board room.

Frogfoot was awarded the Entrepreneurial Company of 2007 award by Frost & Sullivan after we participated in their South African Broadband market survey.

One more award to hang in our reception area.

This is the first part of a 9 part look into the secret headquarters of Frogfoot Networks. The kitchen is always a good place to start a tour, so grab a cuppa coffee and lets start exploring.

Frogfoot loves Open Source Software — Pretty much everything we do is powered by it, including this website.

When we first decided to redo our website we chose to build it on top of the excellent Wordpress publishing platform. The reason for this was simple… Wordpress is both user friendly and powerful. We didn’t *need* Wordpress, but it makes the daily management of the website very easy… we like easy.

The biggest gripe with Wordpress is that most of the sites developed on top of it end up looking like, well, blogs… and often they look like one of the popular Wordpress themes that someone has modified.

Frogfoot is unique… we have our own style.

Once we had a design it was time for me to program the theme. Even though the site appears to use three different themes (Consumer, Business and Blog), it’s actually all one theme that I put together from scratch.

But the real magic here is the things we take for granted because they “just work”.

The site is running on a virtual server called a Xen box… What is a xen box I hear you asking? Xen is, as with all good things, Open Source. Xen allows Frogfoot to run multiple virtual servers on one real server. Each one of the virtual servers is completely independent of its “parent” and “siblings”. Which basically means that you can have complete control of your own Xen box on one of our servers… it’s like having your very own server for a fraction of the cost. We run our website on a Xen server with the exact same configuration and performance we sell to the public.

Running on our Xen server is Linux. Linux powers Frogfoot! On this particular server we’re running our standard Debian Etch Distro.

The web server is the amazingly powerful Apache web server running with PHP5 and the database is powered by MySQL 5. We get direct live access to the server by mounting directories with sshfs, a neat way of mounting directories on servers on the other side of the internet. I use The GIMP graphics editing program.

Here in my office I’m running Ubuntu Linux (Gutsy) and the best web browser around Firefox with a host of other open source tools that we all use constantly.

We hope you enjoy the site and check back regularly to read our blog.

We’ve recently received some emails, and phone calls, from our customers about SPAM. We really know how you feel, SPAM wastes a lot of our time. In a general 24hr period the Frogfoot mail servers handle roughly 87000 messages, we reject about 65000 messages of which about 2000 contain viruses. Only about 20000 make it through. That means that more than 75% is unwanted mail. It gets quite technical but we’ve drawn up a really cool diagram that illustrates exactly how our SPAM filtering works. Check it out if you’re looking for a deeper understanding of the process.

You should know that even with statistics like that there is presently no effective way to avoid 100% of all SPAM. It is, unfortunately, a fact of life in the 21st Century a bit like the petrol price and more recently load-shedding.

To avoid it all together we could configure our SPAM scanning systems to be much more aggressive but then the chances of us flagging an important email as spam increase exponentially. This very uptight approach to SPAM is not effective. You see while computers are super intelligent they’re not as perceptive as people. Sometimes the SPAM is so well crafted that they can’t see the difference between it and a real message.

Obviously our primary concern is to make sure you get all your important email so we had to ask ourselves the following questions; is it better to ensure that you receive no SPAM but also end up losing some vital email? Or is it better to get all your mail and occasional receive an inappropriate SPAM message that includes one-liners like “dreaming of a bigger love stick”?

We decided that it was better for you to receive all your emails and deal with the frustration of SPAM than miss out on anything because our filtering methods were too stringent.

You can also help in the battle by using an intelligent email client, like Thunderbird, to flag any SPAM that slips through the woodwork. This method, coupled with our SPAM filtering methods, is the most effective way of dealing with the few last bit of SPAM that find their way into your Inbox.

This is the traditional “Hello World!” post to launch the Frogfoot Blog.

Some quick background on the history of Frogfoot’s websites.

Around 2000, we started with a simple static website. It was pretty simple and looked something like this.

In 2004 we built a new site. We spend about 6 months planning and creating the artwork. It took the form of a story “of a frog revolution” with 6 water colour painted scenes. The original artworks can be found in our reception area. It was something between Planet of the Apes and Monkey Island. The site was flash based. You can find the original here. The artwork can be found here.

Around 2006 we built a more traditional html site. Which you can find here. You’ll notice it used frames, which was something we wanted to move away from.

For the 2007 Futurex launch of our Wifi hotspot product we put up a new website. We used Worpress as a CMS for the first time. Here is a screenshot.

Which brings us to the new 2008 Wordpress based site. It took us about a month to design and a another month to implement, develop and refine it to the point of launch. It’s much cleaner and simpler and lighter than the last site.

We built a Wordpress theme from scratch to suit our needs. It’s also the first time we’re serious about using the blog features of Wordpress. We’ve integrated our online shop (consumer services) features into the main site and developed a new client sign-up process. Our business services and partnership product offerings are now categorised and easy to browse.

The new website will be a central platform for our company, providing details about our services, allowing clients to order services easily, a way of interacting with our customers and sharing news and ideas.

Hope you like it, let us know what you think.

Why “Pirate Radio”?

You may be wondering why we named this blog: “Pirate Radio”. We’ll..

• We have a Frog Pirate mascot.
• The name refers to Pirate Radio stations of the old days, read: alternative media.
• We’d like to see this a platform to interact in a casual, friendly, alternative and fun way.
• In some ways it will be a “broadcasting” platform, but it’s not like traditional radio style broadcasting, we would like it enable two-way communication.
• We’re taking some artistic license in being a bit rebellious and non-conformist. Read, unique and remarkable. To stand out from the rest of the pack.
• We support a few ongoing revolutions, mostly in the South African telecommunications market. Open Source, New Media, Wifi, VoIP, Broadband Internet…
• This blog is a “Soundtrack to these Revolutions”.

Meet the Frogfoot Bloggers

A short description of the Frogfoot blog characters and an introduction to the personalities who write for this blog….

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