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Browsing the Local Interwebs
I sometimes have some people telling me that there's no point behind local-only ADSL as all the worth-while sites are hosted overseas. Although many (if not most) South Africans opted for hosting their blogs and other sites overseas because of the ridiculous local bandwidth prices, there are still many great sites hosted inside of this country. Here is a short list of the ones I use most frequently.
My Broadband, the famous portal site for everything internet-related (and actually tech-related in general) in South Africa, is still one of my favourites. There's everything, news, forums, blogs, photos, etc. I also love the wug.za.net gallery.
The CLUG Park helps me to keep updated with what's happening in the geeksphere and the CLUG Wiki is also a handy point of reference every now and then. The Geek Dinner and WAPA are also good to watch. And of course, to me Tectonic is just unmissable!
As far as news (in general) is concerned, we are spoiled for choice. In no particular order:
You can also go to the WeatherSA site directly.
One of the best things about The Times for me is actually the multimedia section. Believe it or not, the videos are hosted locally. :)
Although I couldn't find that many "Web 2.0" sites and utilities specifically, there is of course TimesURL (complete with API) for shortening long URLs.
As far as communication goes, we definitely have some options. Although there used to be two public Jabber servers, there is currently only Jabber.co.za left (to my knowledge). The nice thing is that although you only connect to a local server, you can still chat to anybody on any of the other Jabber servers out there so you can easily communicate with friends and family overseas (including anybody using Google Talk). You can even Twitter using the Twitter Jabber bot.
We still have lots of IRC networks though (for those that still use it), including (my favourite) Atrum but there's also LagNet and the old ZAnet.
We also have some great download mirrors, which are obviously the best part of "local-only" as it's very bandwidth-intensive. Because I use ISDSL local, I normally first try ftp.is.co.za but if I can't find what I want I go directly to mirror.ac.za. Unfortunately their PHP mirror still seems broken but in general their mirrors are updated much quicker than ftp.is.co.za, especially their Ubuntu mirror which was ready with the latest ISOs at the time of the (official) Ubuntu Hardy release.
I'm sure there's many other servers out there I still have to discover but at least this gives you a good start. If you know of more (especially servers that host multimedia content), please comment! :)
Copyright © 2004-2009 Charl van Niekerk. All articles are released under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 South Africa licence, unless where otherwise stated.
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