Nur Ahmad Furlong

Category: Web

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.

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October 29, 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
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.

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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October 22, 2007
If Architects had to work the way web designers do
I read this one a while ago and as a web designer found it both hilarious and sad at the same time. Tell me what you think. It’s sounds so bizarre but is a daily reality.
Dear Mr. Architect:
Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.
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October 21, 2007
Blog Action Day 2007 a huge success
Spending the last few weeks just focussing on getting my business going has caused me to neglect my environmental and sustainability focus for a while. Even though I had writing a Blog Action Day post on my calendar I just never got around to it so I thought the least i could do is report on the success of the event.

Just so you know, October the 15th was Blog Action Day, a day devoted to blogging about the environment and highlighting global environmental issues to create awareness for the plight of our planet. Bloggers were called upon to break with their usual blogging schedule to take part by posting about the environment and in that way making the environment an issue at the top of the agenda on that particular day. It’s a great experiment in social networking and tackling societal issues via these channels, a topic I hope to write alot about very soon and one I have started applying some thinking and action to myself.
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October 17, 2007
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.
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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October 15, 2007