Nur Ahmad Furlong

Category: Blogging

  • How can we make WPCPT meetup #3 rock?

    All you wordpress superstars, Planning for wordpress meetup 3 is under way. We can’t do a thing without wordpressy peeps though. Check out the latest post on how we can make the next meetup Rock Big Time.

    We got some ideas to start you off, first off we’d like some feedback if you were at the last one and please send your photos to post on the site as well.

    Head on over to http://wpcapetown.wordpress.com/ and get involved.

  • SA Blog awards ceremony tonight at UCT Tennis Club

    It’s taken a while to reach this point. Tonight the winners of the SA Blog awards will be announced at the UCT Tennis club.

    The 2008 South African blogs awards ceremony will be hosted on Wednesday 2nd April 2008 at Cape town.

    Time: 6:30 for 7pm
    Dress: Smart casual
    Address: UCT Tennis club
    Programme: Formal awards between 7 – 9pm

    RSVP: If you’re planning to attend, please head on over to the SA Blog Awards Wiki and put your name on the list. Also, please indicate whether or not you drink alcohol or not and if you’re a vegetarian.

    I’ve got a new haircut for the event, meaning, all my hair is gone, but I’m not much of a smart casual dresser so will have to go the extra mile to fit into the smart category, I’m usually extra casual as far as I can help it.

    Hope to see some of the more established bloggers in the community there, I’m not expecting to feature really though as I’m a bit of a newbie but it’s great to have received nominations and votes. Competing with Adii is a bit of a bummer in most cases, he’s got an army behind him and has been at this for way longer adding much more value than I do. I reckon he might take the category I’ve been nominated for, (ie – Best Blog about Design) though both of our blogs are not really exclusively about design.

    To those who are attending, I’m looking forward to chatting to each and every one of you so don’t be shy, I’ll try not to be, come over and say hi if you see a bald headed guy with a beard strolling around looking a little lost, that will probably be me :).

    See you all there.

  • WordPress 2.5 has hit the shelves – I’ve just upgraded

    So finally, and with a day to spare before the end of the month the much hyped and long awaited wordpress 2.5 is officially available for download as a “stable” release and it’s looking like it’s packed with alot more value than expected. I’m going through the motions right now of backing up, and getting ready to take that brave upgrade step.

    If you visit the wordpress.org website you’ll notice a slight brand refresh and you can feel the distinct touch the Happy Cog guys have added to the interface as well as in the admin panel where the user interface has seen a significant upgrade.

    The development team have been hard at work putting all their efforts into creating a much more user friendly and feature packed product which I’m sure will make lots of wordpress enthusiasts and newbies alike very happy. Something I’m looking forward to testing out, especially with some recent problems experienced on a client site is the a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code. Here’s what the release page has to say:

    WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.

    I’ve just upgraded and am already impressed by some of the features, especially so the automatic upgrade of plugins which I’ve taken full advantage of. Make sure you follow every step of the upgrade process in order and you do full backups of your db and site files. Good luck to all upgraders.

  • WordPress Meetup Cape Town #2 takes wpcpt meets a step up

    Yesterday’s wordpress meetup at the Bandwidth Barn was a step up from the first one held in Feb. Because of my huge workload right now this post will be written one sentence at a time. For now if you don’t yet know about the wordpress meetups check it out at http://wpcapetown.wordpress.com or just google “wordpress cape town meetup” or something of the sort. Callum’s suggestion of using “wpcpt” as our master tag when refering to the local meetup is one I think we should go with.

    For starters the turnout and involvement was much better than meetup#1, though there are a few critical aspects of the meetup we now need to discuss going forward to make it something of real substance. Anyone interested in the attending the next one give me a shout. We’ll be putting together a planning team soon.

    Those who made it this time around were in no order of priority: ChrisM, Callum Macdonald, Henk Kleynhans, Adii, Foxini, Sarah, Selim Kagee, Nadah, Jamaal, Francois Raubenheimer, rafiq, Foxinni, Stelio, Johann Botha, Kilian Hagemann, Miguel, Frans Kuipers, Joe(amobia),

    At the meet Callum did a sterling job of drumming up excitement and getting people interacting. Well, errr, he tried his best and though there was a slow start we got a few sessions onto the white board for people to vote on. People were interested in chatting about WordPress MU, Using wordpress for social networks, Drupal comparison, Why wordpress, WordPress security, Plugins, WordPress 2.5

    There was a range of people at different levels of wordpress knowledge and experience so it was a bit tricky, I’d pitch myself in the middle somewhere between the complete newbies and the ultra wordpress geeks like Callum.

    I was particularly impressed by the way Nadah of work online, a complete wordpress newbie and sceptic from the first meetup, has quickly become a total enthusiast. She admits becoming somewhat of a blog junkie of late.

    Comparing Blogger, Moveable Type & WordPress, by Henk

    Henk hit us with an awesome session taking a critical look at 3 different blogging platforms and questioning the pros and cons of each. From where I’m standing wordpress comes out tops, though the others may have a point or 2 over wordpress on different levels. Henk currently runs at least 1 blog on wordpress, blogger and moveable type.

    I personally get a yucky feeling whenever I am faced with a blogger based blog and tend to stay away from them as much as possible. It has to have something to do with the fact that I’m a designer and a sucker for pretty looking things which blogger does not facilittate very well.

    I’m hoping we can get the PPT Henk put together to show you all, will have to ask him nicely.

    What’s your fav plugin

    The session broke out into a plugin show & tell with a few of us sharing plugin ideas and asking about plugins we’ve been wanting to get out hands on. I was off on a tangent about a plugin which allows you to manage sidebar content out of a specific post category or page though I don’t think I got my point across very well. We discussed some issues surrounding cache plugins including my recent disaster with WP Super cache and hope to get a recommended plugins list going. Chris recommended php speedy to help imrpove performance for high traffic sites.

    WordPress Security Issues

    One of the more technically focussed topics which were discussed was security. The concerns were voiced by those who are managing and hosting multiple installations of wordpress for clients or organisations. WordPress is known to be exploitable and there have been cases wherewell known sites have been hacked into and even hijacked completely. The discussion centred around updatability of multiple installs as well and the guys through a few suggestions around including working off the SVN codebase.

    The guys lost a few of of us along the way when they veered into ultra-geek mode.

  • Miraculously my Categories have returned?

    So my cats are back in the wordpress hat!

    After some trouble with my comments going walkies, it seems all is well again in nomad-one land. Turns out the problem was caused by some quota limit which caused some plugin problems and not the plugins themselves so WP Super Cache and friends, my apologies. Donncha was kind enough to point out that the WP Super Cache plugin doesn’t have any code which can access the categories db at all. The WP-DBManager plugin by Lester Chan came in handy and allows you to repair damaged database tables, back-up and restore your database and generally manage and keep your wordpress db in tip-top shape. I recommend it highly as it helped me restore some data which seemed to have been lost.

    I’m at a loss for words right now and am hoping and praying that I will find a solution other than having to re-categorize my entire sites posts. Something randomly went wonky with my WP Super Cache Plugin which forced me to disable and then delete it. The result was total loss of post categorization, tagging references as well as loss of my entire blogroll.

    If anyone has a solution out there please let me know, I might even reward you if I can manage it. Be very very careful with plugins and remember to keep a regular backup, my last backup is more than a month old. Also export your blog content to an xml file regularly which will allow you to import it all into a new installation should you need to do so.

    YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!

  • What’s the whole buzz about WordPress 2.5?

    As you may have heard WordPress 2.5, the much hyped upgrade from 2.3 skipping 2.4 has been delayed for more than the promised week. I don’t know much about what they’ll be doing with the new release and took a little peak at the demo site.

    So what is really different about WordPress 2.5

    Admin Interface Re-design

    The admin area of wordpress has seen a significant overhaul, not so much in functionality as far as I can tell, but in terms of the user-interface and design with a few added extras. Here’s hoping it works faster than the existing one as I find one of the issues is the loading time with my limited bandwidth. I logged into the 2.5 demo site and poked around a little taking a few pics.

    Here’s a few screens of the admin interface

    Wordpress 2.5 Dashboard re-designed

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