Nur Ahmad Furlong

Category: Wordpress

  • Lessons I have learnt going from 0 – 1000 in 1 month

    I’m so excited about the progress of my humble little site and though in many people’s eyes my few achievements might seem minuscule, I’m over the moon at the results I have achieved in a very short space of time that I had to share it with you.

    First things first lets go to the numbers. Using the wp-stats plugin has been so much fun for me being able to see where all my visitors are coming from and what they’re up to when they visit my site. I went from a personal blog with not much direction and little idea of what I was trying to achieve to 1000 visitors in one month.

    Nomad-one WordPress visitor statistics September - October 2007

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  • The South African new media scene is hotting up

    The last few weeks have been an amazing experience for me as a blogger, designer and new media strategist though it’s been one steep learning curve. It all started when I quit my day job a little short of 2 months ago. I had been blogging for a while experimentally and on more of a personal level just writing about my own stuff, anything that interested me really. I never paid any attention to visitors, to rankings, search engines, all of that stuff just made little difference to me.

    I think it started when I first installed the stats plugin in my wordpress and started noticing some activity based on my posting. It was all pretty tame and just a few trickles of curious onlookers. When I decided to become a true nomad and take the plunge into solo uncertainty I knew I had to start doing something more serious with my site and had to start getting serious about networking as well. That was just less than 2 months ago, so I started clicking & reading, adding plugins, modding my blog, adding facebook friends, signing up for linked in & my genius, started linking all my social networks to each other, subscribed to a whole batch of RSS Feeds, set up my own feed, wrote more content for my site, designed my new logo … Wow. I can’t actually believe I did all this stuff in such a short space of time.

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  • Muti now part of our favourite bookmarking wordpress plugin

    Looking around for ways to allow people to submit my posts to various social bookmarking networks I was introduced to share-this by a friend a while ago which is a much more elegant way of adding a whole host of bookmarking options in a discreet manner. I just hate those long lists of icons cluttering up the bottom of every new post.

    When I started investigating adding the South African variants I came across a few plugins but struggled a little adding some of these onto my blog easily enough. When I noticed that Rafiq Phillips had added muti to the sociable plugin, one which I hated using myself I decided to see if I could do the same with share-this by Alex King. I’ve never edited a plugin before but this was extremely easy. I just poked around in some code in some other plugins and checked out some of the syntax, repeated it for this one, tested and Wallaaah! It’s “MUTIFIED”.

    Download the mutified share-this here.

    You can thank me by reading my posts and mutiying them one at a time :).

    PS: I’m no php developer so cannot offer any support for this plugin modification, use it at your own risk. Ive tested it on my own site and it works fine. If you do find any problems let me know and I’ll see if I can find someone who can sort you out.

    There was a small Problem with the upload of 24/10/07 which has now been fixed.

  • Web Guru Spotlight 2: Chris Garrett – Pro blogger and online media strategist

    Web Guru Spotlight 2: Chris Garrett – Pro blogger and online media strategist

    Today we will be speaking to Chris Garrett, professional blogger and online media strategist. Chris runs his blog www.chrisg.com which discusses among other things, blogging, internet marketing and new media. He also runs an internet marketing companies, omiq, which aims to help organisations achieve more through their online activities.

    Web Guru Spotlight: Chris Garrett, professional blogger and online media strategist

    Good day Chris and welcome to nomad-one, my humble beginnings of a blog. Having scoured the blogosphere over the past few months in the hunt for gems of wisdom on blog strategies, forgive me for using such a silly term, I was pleasantly surprised by what your site had to offer. I’ve come across quite a number of “professional blog strategists” who claim to offer miracle cures and instant success strategies but your approach seems much more grounded and based on good wholesome experience.

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  • Web Guru Spotlight 1 – Interview with Small Potato

    Web Guru Spotlight 1 – Interview with Small Potato

    Today is the beginning of the first in a series of interviews I hope to host with top web personalities, people who have made some kind of success online and who have something valuable to share with us about the web.

    The first in the series of Web Guru Interviews: nomad-one meets Small Potato of wpdesigner.com

    We will be speaking to Small Potato of WPDesigner.com, professional blogger and wordpress theme guru. Well at least he’s my Guru for now. SP runs a blog which focusses on the development of wordpress themes and all things wordpress in general. He offers a range of free wordpress themes which he has developed in a very short period of time and gives advice to other theme developers and wordpress users on how to make the most of wordpress.

    Good day Small Potato and welcome to nomad-one, my humble beginnings of a blog. Visiting your website, wpdesigner.com has become somewhat of a fixture on my daily to do list and is now also one of my RSS feeds I regularly keep my eye on. It seems that you’ve managed to achieve quite a bit of success in the last few months in increasing the size of your readership and subscriber base on your blog. I’m particularly impressed by what seems to be a very clear strategy you are implementing in achieving this growth.

    So lets get to it then!

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  • Branding Bettina Branding

    I was approached by Bettina Moss, a Strategic Brand Consultant, to develop a visual identity for her new brand consultancy, "BettinaBranding" and to assist with creating a simple yet interactive online presence. Bettina had a few ideas for starters which helped get the process going, but once ideas were put through their paces a few new directions developed. One of the initial conceptual ideas was to create a spiral element which conveyed the message of Branding being an inward and outward looking process. As is the case many times what is seen in the mind comes out very differently in reality and we progressed to develop a simpler yet bolder identity.

    Draft Logo & Branding Ideas

    bettina-logo3

    Because of the name BettinaBranding and the emphasis on the B it Bcame clear very early on that the letter B was our friend though at times it wasn’t Bhaving the way we would have liked it to. Oh I’ll stop B’ting around the Bush, oops, couldn’t help that last one.

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