Nur Ahmad Furlong

Category: Productivity

  • Selling my Web, Strategy, Creativity, Productivity Books

    I’m not a big reader when it comes to novels and function in general, I just find the fantasy a bit of a waste of time to be honest. But when it comes to books covering practical knowledge on the stuff that matters to me, I’m a bit OCD.

    So i’ve been trying to clear out some of the books I haven’t been using in a while and I found a set of real gems from my Web, Strategy, Creativity, Productivity collection. Each of these books has played a major role in helping me get to grips with the range of subjects I need to keep myself informed on as a Web & Creative Professional.

    These books cover a wide range of subjects from Coding & Coding Standards, to Productivity, Time Management, Marketing & Communications Strategy, Web Strategy, Usability, Creative Thinking. The information contained in these books should be enough to get any web novice up to speed with the principles and methods needed to dive straight into the web industry. They’re also a great resource or reference for anyone working in this industry or teaching/presenting on these topics.

    1. The Open Brand: When Push Comes to Pull in a Web-Made World
    2. Six Thinking Hats – EDWARD DE BONO
    3. Lateral Thinking: A Textbook of Creativity – Edward De Bono
    4. The 4-Hour Work Week and Timothy Ferriss
    5. The Truth about Email Marketing – Jenkins
    6. rework – 37 Signals
    7. don’t make me think – Steve Krug – New Riders
    8. building findable websites – New Riders
    9. Introducing HTML5 – Lawson Sharp – New Riders
    10. Designing for Web Standards – Second Edition – Jeffrey Zeldman
    11. The Ultimate CSS Reference – Sitepoint
    12. A Designer’s Research Manual – Jenn + Ken Visocky O’Grady
    13. eMarketing eXellence – Chaffey Smith – Third Edition
    14. Starting & Running a Successful Consultancy – How To Books
    15. The Art & Science of CSS – Sitepoint
    16. Logo Lounge 2 – Rockport

    I’m planning on selling this entire stash to the highest bidder to make space for some new material.

  • Co-Working Spaces Hit Cape Town at TheiPlex.co.za

    Having designed the website for TheiPlex.co.za recently, and being a solo artist working from home, coffee shops etc, I decided to give their co-working spaces a bash out of desperation to find a space to concentrate better on work.

    TheiPlex is situated in the newly developed Boulevard Complex in Woodstock just outside of the CBD in Cape Town. Woodstock has become somewhat of a buzz in the last few years with creative, tech and corporates moving out of the city centre.

    A Business Idea much needed in “Silicon Cape”

    I really love what TheiPlex have gone about setting up and blogged about something of this nature way back in 2007. That was just before I decided to go solo and what a roller coaster it’s been since then. I’ve never fully mastered the art of confining myself to my work space at home and to be honest I doubt I ever will, so having the chance to catch some quiet time in a clean, clear workspace was really refreshing.

    I called them up in a frantic rush, with deadlines hanging over my head and anxiety boiling up from the need to get things done.

    TheIplex has been designed to set an atmosphere conducive to creative work and innovation. You’ll see form the get go colorful backdrops, themed meeting rooms & clean workspaces.

    The Reception Area

    The Iplex Cape Town rception

    Jts outside the building you’ll find a nice little Vida Cafe, one of my favorite coffee shops in Cape Town, though they are a little pricy. The iPlex offers some pretty decent coffee themselves at quite a good price and you can give the reception/concierge team a buzz when you need some caffeine to keep the engines firing.

    The Workspaces

    I Grabbed a spot in the corner near the window and plugged in. Wifi on tap and coffee a few meters away got me in the mode to get some serious work done.

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    Later on after feeling a little more relaxed i decided to poke around a bit and check out some of the meeting Rooms. My favorite one was the war room, which comes with whiteboard style wall paint so you can brainstorm directly onto the wall surface, take some pics when you’re done, if I’m not mistaken they take snaps of your ideas for you as well. I was alone so would probably have been a bit strange to test it out on my own, really looking forward to the change to brainstorm with a team in a space like that.

    20102011108

    The War room is fitted out with netting and camouflage hang in from the ceiling, color coded seating and some really great little army figures running about to get you into combat mode.

    After a couple of days of driving into Woodstock I needed to take a break from driving, LOL. But the cool thing is it’s flexible so if you buy some hours you can choose when to make use of them.

    Some other meetings rooms and pics form the rest of the space below. I’v been planning on running my WordPress theme Dev course here as well, it’s a great venue and caters for events as well with a largish events room.

  • nurahmadfurlong.com domain registered for my online resume

    Sending out my resume is one of the things I do consistently no matter what’s happening in my career.

    Whether I’m happy in my current situation, looking for a job or just casually scouting around to see what’s happening out there. It’s benefited me in a number of ways, one being making connections and becoming known to various companies and individuals within the communications industry.

    There have been times where a resume sent out comes back to visit me just when I need it most, someone calls and says, “Hey are you still doing such and such” or, “Are you still interested in a position?”.

    Being a web enabled worker means I need to keep a constantly updated profile online, and with tools like WordPress and freely available themes of all kinds it makes setting up a website for just about any purpose a real synch. So I acted on a thought which has been bugging me for a while and registered www.nurahmadfurlong.com to use as an easily up-datable online resume or profile. Currently I’ve slapped up a simple digital business card wordpress theme to post a few vital contact and social link details but I plan to build a more comprehensive resume website which I can keep updating and can also feed RSS and other activity streams into so I can consolidate my activities into 1 personal space. I use dreamhost for my personal hosting and they make it super easy to register new domains and install software like wordpress within a few clicks, no FTP necessary.

    It also makes it easy to just pop the link into a message instead of scratching around for my most updated CV or intro letter at times when I need to introduce myself for whatever reason.

    I highly recommend any professional builds themselves an online resume or personal profile of some sort which gives new prospects or potential employers a good idea of who you are and what you’re doing or have done in the past. It also shows you take your career seriously. It’s not extremely hard to set one of these up. You could either register a low cost domain & hosting package or use a free website service like wordpress.com or any other for that matter.

    Then there’s also resume services zerply.com where I recently registered for a free online resume. The cool thing about Zerply is you can quickly pull your career history details from Linkedin or Facebook and have a resume up in a minute or 2. Have a look at mine – http://www.zerply.com/profile/nomadone

    Of course I do keep my CV on this site as well so anyone visiting can download and get a quick idea of my experience and focus. I have 2 CVs, a 1 page PDF document and a much longer more detailed one when I need to provide more details into my career history, skillset etc.

  • New tools for my digital nomad belt

    For the longest time now I’ve been agonising over how to manage my collaborations with partners and clients online. Many of the popular web workers swear by Basecamp, and I believe it is a great product. I’m not big on the monthly payment model for software as a service(Saas) and have instead opted for using tools which I can purchase once and own outright, run on my owner machine or servers and own my own data. I’m just weird like that. I also have a limited budget, which is probably the main motivating factor.

    A Few great new tools I’ve started using

    So, Recently I’ve had the pleasure of finding a few really great apps, which include The Hit List (awesome Mac task management) which I now use to keep track of all my projects and to do’s & iClockr (time capturing tool now known as Lumina) which I use in conjunction with Invoice 3 (invoice/billing app) to keep track of time spent and generate invoices from billable hours. These are great for my own personal use, but I was still without a crucial component of this mix, something I could use remotely, to keep track of interactions with clients and other partners.

    Pay once or open source, no monthlies for me please

    I don’t own a credit card and probably never will, so continuously having to pay for services online on a regular basis becomes a little tedious. I’ve tried out a few self hostable solutions like the new collabtive, open goo and a while back active collab, all of which seem to have the makings of a really good web office for the location independent web worker.

    It was only a couple of weeks ago that something else caught my eye. Seems I’ve had quite a few of these in the last few months which is great.

    Hello Open Atrium, goodbye basecamp

    Say Hi to Open Atrium, a drupal based online collaboration system which could be used as an on the fly intranet or for many other purposes depending on your way of thinking of your ability to customize it.

    Picture 1

    I’ve been wanting to get into using drupal for a while, and this little beauty has pushed me a little closer to that point. It’s quite simple to install, not as simple as WordPress, but then WordPress doesn’t do exactly what this does out the box.

    Open Atrium allows you to create mutliple private or open online spaces to which you can invite as many members for each group as you like. The groups allow creation of blogs, uploading and discussion of documents, posting of micro messages like twitter, creation of projects and tasks through it’s case Tracker as well as creation of events on a calendar. Each person’s profile has the ability to add profile specific versions of each of those tools as well.

    My Open Atrium

    What’s even better is it’s open source, easy to install and allows for integration of your own custom features as well if you’re into drupal development. I’m looking forward to seeing how the community extends this one. Check out a list of features as well as a nice intro video on their Feature Page at http://openatrium.com/features

  • Getting the most out of What We Do

    Last night I had a highly insightful chat on gtalk with @naeem who runs a number of successful online businesses and interest sites out of Johannesburg, South Africa. Naeem is someone I admire for being able to see a business opportunity around almost every corner, you can tell he’s been doing what he does for quite a while.

    He passed on a really great online business idea

    It was Something really simple and with potential to make some good dosh online, which got me thinking about the way I have been approaching my career. I’m not about to share his idea with the world to run off and make it irrelevant to me, but after coming across the following post written by Bud Caddell on whatconsumesme.com, I also re-thought whether just any good business idea would do for me.

    venn

    This Venn diagram gave me some serious food for thought in terms of how to go about sticking to what I do well, what I love doing and still making a decent living out of it. The post is entitled “How to be Happy in Business“. Apart from being a really well designed piece of informaton design, the concepts really hit me hard and also made me think back to my business ideas convo with @naeem. Would it do to get into just any type of business just to make money?

    Budd lists the 3 problems highlighted by the diagram:

    • We can’t determine how to make enough money from the things we want to do, and do really well.
    • We’ve found things we want to do, and can be paid for, but we’re not the best game in town.
    • We’ve come across things people want us to do, that we do well (or at least better than the competition) that we really don’t want to do.

    I’m the type of person that generally comes up with business ideas connected to a direct need I have, and also most times relating to something which I’m really interested in, which helps me get my head fully inside the whole development process. Ok so I haven’t really succeeded with any of my crazy business ideas yet, LOL, nor have I even progressed to prototyping phase with some of the more serious ones, but this means that something disconnected to what I love doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance of even featuring. Then comes the problem of monetizing what I’m really truely passionate about.

    Me gots lots to think about regarding this diagram!

    On the same little stroll around the interwebs, I also found a really great way of identifying my own special business model, and applying my efforts in that direction. Gina Trapini, “software and self improvement junkie” wrote a piece on Freelance Switch where she says,

    “While I do plan to make money as a freelancer, my ultimate goal is to generate satisfaction.”

    (While money is a part of that, so is learning, service, and creativity, so we’ll just use the umbrella term “satisfaction.”)

    She shares her personal “business model” in plain & simple terms, What’s important to her is more than just paying the bills while doing what she specializes in.

    Personal Business Model of Gina Trapani

    This particular concept highlights the importance of consantly tracking your activities based on what’s most important to you. Of course knowing what’s most important is step 1, having a plan to engage more in those areas comes next. I found in the last 2 months, tracking my activities in detail has given me huge insight in where the problem areas are. I’ve started taking a few steps in a new direction and these 2 posts/diagrams has helped wrap my head around the way forward.

  • Online Doc/Note storage, Google docs & Evernote

    As you can tell by my last post I’ve suffered a bit of a dilemma relying to heavily on locally stored data. Sure backing up would help, but that’s one side of the story, sometimes you need more than a huge clunky usb harddrive to retrieve lost data quickly.

    I use 2 solutions, google docs and evernote. Google docs is alot more powerful as an Office suite though for me evernote is alot easier to deal with and it just saved me huge amounst of time with it’s online synced account storing data added through the desktop app. It also helps having an browser add-on to quickly grab snippets from the web. Only problem I have is my paranoia with the reliability of giving away your data and needing a web connection to access it. Have a look at what the 2 solutions have to offer.

    Google Docs

    Create and share your work online

  • Upload from and save to your desktop
  • Edit anytime, from anywhere
  • Pick who can access your documents
  • Share changes in real time
  • Files are stored securely online

    • Evernote

    On the web

    Create, clip, and share notes on the web and see them everywhere

    On your phone

    Take snapshots, read to-do lists, record audio whenever and wherever you like

    On your desktop

    Search through all your notes, even find text within images, whether online or off

    Evernote have posted a tutorial on exporting your notes from google notebook which is no longer being developed by google. You can also email notes to your evernote account using a special address generated in your account. Nice one.