While the term "beta" has been massively overused in the whole Web 2.0 shebang, it still has it's purposes. For instance, the version up to this point was Alpha. It was rough and there were a lot of things still unknown about it. With this Beta release, people who might have checked it out before should check it out again. The site looks and interacts on a completely different level now. It is much more complete and now we are working to refine elements to it.

The focus of the site has been honed as well. In what we're deeming, Stage 1, we're focusing on creating a blogging, communication, and media platform for Sub-Saharan Africa. Many people might be asking, "Why? There's already Wordpress, Blogspot, and a slew of others." This is true and when it comes to large blogging systems, many of these do an excellent job. The main issue with them is that they're for the web at large as viewed from developed nations. The web in developing nations is a much different beast.

To that end, we're really focusing on a few key points:

- Number One is localization. We're really working like crazy to get Maneno translated and functional in six languages. And by localized, we mean every part. Someone will eventually be able to only speak Swahili or French and be able to use the entire site without anything popping up in English. It's not as easy as it sounds because the internet by definition is English-centric (due to the parts that make it being developed in the US in English), but we're working to make this possible.

- Number Two is download speed. Web 2.0 came up with the brilliant plan that any website can have pages that are up to one meg to download. While this can work for those in the US, the further away from the server you get, the longer the website takes to load. And of course, if you factor in that most people in the world are not on broadband internet, then you run in to real problems. With Maneno, we're working to keep the pages as small as possible in order to keep up accessibility for everyone. Right now, the home page is about 60kb and we're striving to shave even a little bit more off that if possible. Compare that to a normal Wordpress blog home page, at about 225kb (if there aren't any images to the articles) and you understand why we're trying to make this difference.

- Number Three is an eventual plan to allow alternative updating to the site. In other words, users won't have to use the web to write articles. This is also a very key point as internet connectivity is paltry over the vast majority of Sub-Saharan Africa. There are a few options out there which we're exploring now, but this will be an eventual feature that we'll add to the site, so more on it later.

- Number Four is article translation and refers back in part to the localization aspect, but is its own entity. We're working to create a better blogging translation system. We know that people in Sub-Saharan Africa usually speak at least two languages and usually a great many more. We want to be able to have the Maneno community be able tin interact and help share articles to as wide a public as possible.

There are all kinds of smaller details but these four points are the main ones. We're working to have all of this come together in to a system that will work to inform better than any before it and have the ability and elasticity to not only last for awhile, but be able to change and incorporate other good things that come along on the web. After all, this isn't just an installation of Wordpress, Typepad, or Drupal; this is an application for Africa.

While various countries run with the belief that everyone is on a broadband connection, we at Maneno are very aware that this is not the case for the world at large and we do what we can to make the site lightweight. Dialup is still very present in the world today and many people are lucky to have even that. I'm not talking about just developing nations here either. There are a great many people in the "developed" West who have to use dialup as thy live too far from a major town to be able to access a faster type of connection.

Because of this, a lot of people are stuck using the original web browser that came with their machine and for many, this means Internet Explorer 6 or even 5.5. These two browsers are incredible broken and unsafe, yet make up anywhere from 30-40% of the browsers that people use to access the internet. It is hard for people on slower connections to upgrade due to painfully long download times. But at some point, folks should really try to upgrade to a more modern browser to protect themselves from all the nasty things on the web. My obvious choice for upgrade is Firefox. There are others as well out there, but this one has proven time and again to be a solid browser that people can rely on to be safe and stable.

With the release of Firefox 3, the browser has gotten even more secure, but at a price of speed. This isn't really noticeable for those on a broadband connection, but for those on dialup, it can be painful. The following suggestions are not recommended, but might be necessary if you've managed to download Firefox 3, but find your non-broadband connection to be even more slow:

Click on Tools > Options.

Click on the Security icon in the window that pops up.

Uncheck the boxes next to 'Tell me if the site I'm visiting is a suspected attack site' and 'Tell me if the site I'm visiting is a suspected forgery'.

Then click on the Advanced icon in that window.

In the tabs you'll see under that click on 'Update'.

Uncheck the boxes next to 'Firefox', 'Installed Add-ons', 'Search Engines'.

Click OK and that should be it.

This will disable a lot of very good security and update systems, but again, it might be necessary. Even still, with all of this disabled, you're much better off using Firefox 3 than Explorer 6 or older.

On an email note, GMail can be very, very slow on dialup. A shortcut around this is to use their mobile version. It's ugly and basic, but if you go to m.gmail.com, you'll undoubtedly find that it moves a lot faster than the full version. It's designed for what used to be the rather limited speed of mobile phone data connections. With even those speeding up these days, we can only keep our fingers crossed that Google won't mess with this handy backdoor.