Nur Ahmad Furlong

Islamic Experience Designer

seo

WordCamp Cape Town 2012 has arrived!

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I’m just about to leave for WordCamp Cape Town 2012, my favourite tech event of the year and it looks like this one’s set to be bigger and better than any of the previous WP related events I’ve attended. I’m also loving the fact that it’s being hosted at one of my favourite places in Cape Town Kirstenbosch Gardens. I’m planning on updating this post as the day progresses with my experiences. That’s the plan at least. Stay tuned!

Here’s a quick wrapup of the talks I managed to catch.

1. Open Source mxPress Plugin

Eric Clements discusses Using WP to setup a Live Mxit Based Journal of Olympics Info. Using mxPress a small team setup a live Olympic Journal Mxit App fed with updates through WordPress. The setup took around 5 hrs and within a couple of weeks they had 10 000 followers.

  • Why WordPress – Ease of content management
  • Why Mxit – Quick Easy Mobile access to large user base

http://www.mxpress.co.za

  • Quick Mxit App setup
  • Go Mobile Quickly and easily
  • Access non smart phone users
  • Great Features of the Plugin – tight WP Integration
  • Integration with Google Analytics

A suggestion from the floor was to make use of a setup like this for monitoring crime and crime reporting through a crowdsourced type setup where non-smartphone users can easily access and update the system.

Eric also mentioned that monitizing on Mxit is much easier than on platforms like facebook.

2. How to Hijack a Themeshop

Riaan Knoetze started creating WordPress themes out of necessity. He says he loves making money in his sleep and was looking for ways to establish passive streams of income. Riaan explains how difficult it is to break into the Theme sales market due to the sheer amount of players. His talk discusses how to leverage existing theme markets and develop extended products based on their products, eg. Developing WooThemes child themes.

Riaan says he’s not a PHP developer, marketing guru or Graphic design super star.

Enter – Premium Child Themes

Eg. Riaan Converted App Theme’s Classipress Classified theme to his own styled version Headline.

  • Riaan goes into Hijacking 101, the tools, skills and knowhow needed to Hijack Existing Premium Themes legally and make money off modifying them.
  • He further explains how to pick a theme shop – their themes need design improvements, functional extensions and users who want extensions.
  • Advanced Hijacking tip – make it legit and get the backing of the theme shop.
  • Cons – revenue split
  • Pros – more exposure, less overhead, support infrastructure …

Imma get myself hijacking!

3. Fred Roed, CEO of WWCreative speaking about Community & Causes

Fred’s intro was a little unconventional discussing the story of the Apaches but boiling down to the issue of Having a serious and meaningful Cause.

Quick Stat – 95% of Brands in South Africa Use Social Media

Fred impressing on the Social Media Stats but reminding us that Trust is so important in the bombardment from multiple channels. People are still interested in trusted communities and connections.

3 Verticals They Focus on at WWC

  1. Attracting Traffic
  2. Converting Traffic
  3. Maintaining

At the centre of it is Cause, something meaningful, something you want to fight for and are passionate about, something you feel for.

Citing the example of Apple, determined to develop Beautiful, Functional Technology. Something which resonates with the users. Fred goes on to cite a wide range of Causes from Virgin taking on the big guys, to Hitler to Steve Hofmeyer.

Why Causes

  • It’s Profitable
  • It’s compelling
  • It’s sustainable
  • Connects People

4. Does Social Media Affect SEO

Neil Starts off comparing statistics – correlation & causation data based on high ranking sites. The Data suggests certain important social functions seem to have some effect on Search Engine Rankings.

Neil Mentions an SEO Moz experiment asking his community to +1 a Post Ranked 16 which then Ranked 6th after many +1’s. He mentions Google Plus profiles linked on Google Webmaster Tools to blogging author page which should allow your author profile to appear on search listings, also shared his recommendation of the AuthorSure plugin to assist with this. He also showed how Google is starting to feature Social activities into analytics tools and reports. Many of the points mentioned are covered by Yoast in his latest SEO outline.

At this stage myself and a few of the guys rushed off to grab some food elsewhere and to stretch our legs, Catering wasn’t Halaal so we grabbed a steak gatsby or 2 down the road, because of which we missed the first session which focused on performance.

Sessions I Missed – Performance, Speed / Load Time

Basically the performance/speed related sessions cover using CDNs (Content Delivery Networks), Caching using built in and Plugins, Controlling which resources get served from your site and which get served from external servers and which versions get served. This includes being wary of the amount and type of plugins used, minifying and compressing some of your sites reosurces and lastly the server you host with. All of these elements work together to drastically improving your site’s performance, user experience and nowadays your site’s rankings based on Google’s new inclusion of major speed factors in their ranking system.

Implementing these enhancements help cut down on the cost of running high traffic sites as well.

5. Optimizing WordPress on the frontend

Byron Rode tackles the subject of performance from the front end side of things after the previous discussions centred around what can be done on the admin and server side. For those who are not able to spend the money needed to have dedicated servers or enhanced server side optimisations and are running on shared hosting there’s alot that can be done as to speed up your site’s load time as well.

Some suggested Plugins

  • W3 Total Cache – Might cause problems when developing and caches are not cleared – old files showing
  • WP Minify – Might not work with certain plugins
  • Using Image Sprites to reduce the amount of loads

Discussing WordPress Transient API – WordPress way of caching Database Queries for serving cached queries later saving on reloading repeated queries.

Byrone makes no apologies for saying that he seriously dislikes plugins due to the various aspects of site performance they negatively affect.

3 Minute Pitches

One of the interesting features of this year’s WordCamp are the 3 minute elevator pitches delivered by some of the microsponsors.  The most interest of them so far for me was Blink Tower, who assist entrepreneurs in getting their messages out there by developing short video messages to help them articular and illustrate what they offer. Most of us could do with some improved articulation of what we do.

Other Pitches centred around raising funds for DARG, animal welfare organisation

https://twitter.com/Ane_vJaarsveld/status/253847381811027968

a mobile testing platform and I forget some of the others.

Panel Discussion – Getting “Started Up”

A Group of 5 Tech Entrepreneurs Discuss how they Succeeded and how others could take their startup ideas forward.

As you can see I’m getting very tired and most likely won’t make it through the last of the presentations. In general it was a good day, some of the content was a little disappointing as compared to last year’s WordCamp. The networking was the best part of the event getting back in touch with some of the familiar faces in the community and meeting a few new ones.

MemeBurn has a writeup of the event to fill in some fo the gaps I’ve left and you can search #wcct on twitter for tweets form the event.

I Must Be getting Old

I was unable to see the entire event through to the end due in part, to some tight deadlines and lack of sleep over the last few weeks.

I’m super disappointed I missed Matt Cohen’s Presentation about Shifting the WordPress Mindset. See his slides below. From what I hear it was great and took the audience on a trip down memory lane from the early days through to where we currently are and into what lies ahead for WP.

My Recommendations:

Coming soon!

All in all it was a very well organised event, though I feel presentations may have not been relevant enough for everyone attending. Last Year’s split focus, publisher vs developer seemed a better configuration and I think this would be the best way to go going forward considering the split focus on the WP community. Those who attended seem to have benefitted in general, I couldn’t find a negative comment apart from one or 2 newbies being baffled by some of the tech talk.

Ashley Shaw & the Lightspeed team have done a fab job this year, thanks a ton again to them!

Reviving my Web Guru Spotlight – Chatting to Rafiq Phillips

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A while back I started posting a series of interviews of people I feel have made a difference to my experience of the web in some way or another. It’s been a while since I’ve posted one and I have the feeling I need to revive this little story and start chatting with some web gurus again.

Today we’ll be hearing a little from Rafiq Phillips, who needs little introduction, especially if you’re based in South Africa.

 webguruspotlight-rafiq

Today we will be speaking to Rafiq Phillips, SEM(Search Engine Marketing) Whizz Kid, web entrepreneur, collaboration enthusiast and general web guru. Rafiq Has a long list of achievements most notably the much respected blog Web AddiCT(S); (Web Application Development, Design & Innovation in Cape Town) which has been going for about 2 years, His Pillar Position at Quirk e-marketing, iDrive.co.za, a web application to help find driving school instructors, SEO blog and a host of other initiatives in collaboration with some of the top names in the SA new media industry.

Just google ‘Rafiq Phillips” and you’ll be shocked at the long list of results. He’s an advocate of the googleCV! When I first saw his picture and didn’t know too much about him I would have thought him to be a junior just moving his way up the ranks, but don’t let his unassuming presence fool you, We’ve got a real Guru in our presence.

So let me welcome to nomad-one, our favourite Web AddiCT.

It’s obvious you’re not a shy guy and don’t lack confidence at all in going out there and saying your say. What has been the greatest influence in pushing you to strive the way you have in achieving your goals.

I’m on a mission to seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave, you know where that’s from 😉

No doubt you’re proudly South African. Seems we have some interesting & challenging times ahead of us. How do you think we can succeed in meeting these challenges.

Most obstacles facing internet start-ups in developing regions of the wwworld, I believe, have been put in place back bureaucrats and ill-informed policy makes. Look at the ODF vs MS debate.

Their is a great opportunity for organisations and individuals to wwwork together and innovate around those man-made constraints and achieve the unthinkable, unthinkable to those who put difficulties in our way or fear the future.

Rafiq, though I envy your success I am sure I’ll not envy your workload. Someone like you must be snowed under permanently. Tell us about a typical day in the life of Rafiq.

If you’d like to follow me around for a typical day the best and easiest way would be to follow me on twitter. The Carte Blanche interview also sums up a typical day of my life in the public timeline..

Technology as we all know is not an end in itself, something I was reminded a while back by Chris Garrett in an interview with him. I’m always full of big ideas and great ambitions but follow through is where the real test lies. How do you go about putting into practice your ideas, or do things happen in a random or more unplanned manner in your wwworld.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi says it best: "You must be the change you wish to see in the world."

I have a final destination in mind but the path usually unfolds as the journey continues.

I’m always reading up on a whole range of productivity methods & Techniques. Tell about your approach to getting things done quicker & better.

Many hands, eyes, minds make wwwork easy. Asking for help is the best way to get things done right. At Quirk my work would bee nothing without the SEO Crew, Carlos Menezes , Suzan Gray, Sarah Manners and Tim Shier just to name a few.

The web Is a great place to promote causes and to initiate projects towards positive change in society. Recently I’ve set up a website to initiate dialogue around a project which has been floating in my mind for close to 10 years now but in the mix of everything else that everyone is trying to achieve it seems each endeavour becomes a little more watered down on its own. Any ideas on how to solve this problem?

Like the various chapters in the emarketing textbook each aspect of emarketing is separate but combined have the ability to achieve your holistic marketing goals on and offline.

In a similar manner, when looking at all the projects you are involved in, do not approach each of them as separate but rather as one project aimed at achieving your big hairy audacious goal. If all the projects you are involved in are not all heading in the same direction should you really be re-thinking and re-aligning your involvement to ensure that your goal is met with each of them.

Where would you position South Africa as a player in the global knowledge economy.

No matter what those on the outside might think. South Africa IS a first world country, with 3rd world problems. That puts us in the best position to use the best of both worlds top offer world class services at the fraction of the cost of our closest competitors

Having followed the social bookmarking onslaught which has hit the South African web do you think its in danger of becoming too dominated by an elite group of web enthusiasts and rules out the rest of the web using population?

no comment.

I know I’m jumping around from topic to topic but please bear with me, I’d like to cross question you on any and everything that comes to mind. What role do you think design plays in the success or failure of web initiatives.

Embed this video by the SEO rapper as my answer.

Can design & technology solve South Africa’s problems?

Can design and technology solve problems? Yes it can. Road Safety and Driver Education are one of the biggest problems facing ALL South Africans on a daily basis. Sites with little or no help from external sources like www.idrive.co.za, www.arrivealive.co.za, www.saidi.org.za and roadsafety.wordpress.com helps the ‘normal’ person on the web, mobile, MXit but could have a greater impact offline with a little more assistance from the right individuals or companies.

What’s your favourite web initiative?

WordPress FTW!

What’s your favourite activity?

Eating home cooked meals.

Where do you see yourself in 3-5 years time?

I’d love to be invited to TED…

How do we prepare ourselves online for 2010 and what effect do you think this event will have on the SA web?

I believe eDucation is the key. Let’s look past the FUD and focus on solving our own problems and not wait for a hand out. 

First project I did in PHP while at Cape Tech in 2003, www.tourguide.co.za, is still running (fully automated) today and could help 100’s of 1000’s of South Africans in the tourism industry with a little work. If anyone would love to get involved with this project which is currently lying dormant. Please contact me directly.

How can each one of us make a difference in the building of the “new new South Africa”

By not repeating the mistakes of our fathers.

Like we’ve come to know him and in typical Rafiq style, a man of few words with one or 2 gems tucked in there. Thanks for chatting with us Rafiq, we’ll be looking forward to your talk at Flying Solo