Nur Ahmad Furlong

Category: Plugins

Great Flickr Photography – Check out Daniel Lurie’s pics
When I came across Daniel Luries’ Flickr account I just had to contact him and give him a compliment on a great collection of imagery. It’s amazing how technology & web 2.0 has levelled the playing fields in many disciplines to allow those who, like Daniel are looking to make a name for themselves. Many times Flickr Photographers are either willing to allow you to use their images with links back or they’re selling great pics at affordable prices.
See a few of Daniel’s shots below:

A quick Flickr search could yield exactly what you were looking for an you might be able to get away with paying flickr photographers much less than you’d be spending at stock photography sites.
Using Creative Commons images on your blog
I’ve also installed a cool wordpress plugin called Photo Dropper which allows you to search appropriate creative commons flickr images and drop them from flickr into your posts via your wordpress admin panel. I think this is a great way for both amateur photographers and bloggers to share the value. The plugin also drops in this nice little credit automatically. photo credit: Millzero Photography ( 99% low fat photography)
February 26, 2008
1st WordPress Meetup Cape Town – Post Mortem
Technorati Tags: wordpress,(un)conference,meetup,“cape town”
After struggling to prevent a few business people from hijacking the session with their own off topic focus, not mentioning any names, we managed to get stuck in talking about a few pertinent issues.
Those who attended were:
- Organiser, Callum Macdonald – Nomadic entrepreneur & web developer/blog master from Scotland
- Marc Pelteret – Business Science / Computer Science Graduate with an interest in open source development
- Christina de Silva, Online marketing strategist and wordpress enthusiast – AlterSage.com
- Nada Jones, sales & biz development executive – Work Online Interactive
- Chris – iMod
- Rob Wilkonson – Butlers Pizza (Energy Crisis Maniac) 🙂
- Will – 2oceansvibe.com
- Grant – mobi me
- Jamaal – Web Strategist at Jayz
What was spoken about?
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February 18, 2008
I won twice in constructive criticism blog commenting
I’m ecstatic at the moment after receiving word from 2 online commenting competitions that I’ve been nominated as a winner. Woohoo!
Firstly on www.adii.co.za I’ve won a copy of adii’s new premium magazine style wordpress theme which is one of the best magazine style themes I’ve come across so far. The competition entailed commenting on some preliminary designs and giving adii some constructive criticism on how he could improve certain areas. So myself and another person were tied first place and have both been awarded a copy of this excellent Premium News theme. I’m hoping to use this theme which I’m going to modify graphically for my www.one-project.org site.
The second prize i was just notified of is from Cerebra.co.za “South Africa’s leading dedicated social and mobile media company” who ran a comments competition toget some constructive criticism on their website which was recently redesigned. Guess what, I’ve won an iPod Nano Woohoo!!! I’ve wanted one of these for ages but just couldn’t afford to spend money on some thing like this. Thanks cerebra, you guys rock.
I’m gonna try to track down my comments which won me these 2 cool prizes and post them here for your viewing pleasure.
Constructive Criticism
The name of the game is constructive criticism and in many cases your viewers are the best source of advice for what you may be doing right or wrong as they’re the people you’re trying to please. Many times there are things we miss because we are caught seeing things from only our own perspective so asking others is a great way to get good feedback. The trick however is to know what is good feedback and what is not. The way these 2 competitions were structured is they rewarded readers for the best, most constructive feedback and because of this incentive the comments were purposely written to be as thoughtful as possible.
It gives me some great insight into my first competition I’ve just launched last night in my Logo Design Q & A section. The basic principle is, you need something others have and you reward them for giving it to you, their clicks, their feedback, their thoughts are valuable to them so if they’re not getting anything from giving these to you they won’t offer what is valuable to them.
Commenting is one of the areas of web 2.0 which has really changed the dynamic completely. If you don’t get it right you could be in for some heavy criticism, if you don’t allow comments you’re cutting off an important aspect of your interaction with your site visitors, but get the recipe right and your site could experience phenomenal growth and popularity. A plugin release recently by Web Addi(CT)s rewards readers for commenting by displaying commenters names in a commenters cloud with the names weighted according to number of comments. It’s an interesting way to stimulate a mutually beneficial relationship between blogger & commenter.
Engage your readers and the general community and you’ll have valuable partners and business supporters by default.
November 2, 2007
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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October 23, 2007
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.
October 23, 2007