Nur Ahmad Furlong

Tag: networking

  • What I learnt about networking from Shane Dryden

    Shane the “Maven” of Ideate tipped us off on this excellent list of tips for surviving networking events. In fact I have first hand experience connected with Shane who recently rescued from feeling like the odd one out at a recent SA Bog Awards ceremony. Shane quickly introduced himself and started a conversation which sparked some interesting thought and lead to the 2 of us having coffee recently.

    Saying Hi makes all the difference

    One of the lessons I learnt from Shane is that adding some meaningful value by being genuinely involved leads to meaningful developments, while being superficial and just chatting to be cool really gets you nowhere. Bloggers who should really be great at genuine dialogue, are guilty quite often of just being chatty for the cameras.

    Add value and become a star

    Due to that little step of Shane saying Hi and sharing some thoughts, led to us meeting and chatting about a business idea I have been working on and getting some great advice from him. It also lead to me finding out about the Heavy Chef Session run by World Wide Creative and attending their User Experience Design presentation. A whole series of events which I have benefited from. Shane probably has no idea how saying hi has affected me and place him in my list of respected individuals. He’s someone who walks his talk.

    Here’s his post on Ten Excellent Networking Tips, which was inspired by the original post Ten Excellent Networking Tips.

  • WordPress Meetup Cape Town #2 takes wpcpt meets a step up

    Yesterday’s wordpress meetup at the Bandwidth Barn was a step up from the first one held in Feb. Because of my huge workload right now this post will be written one sentence at a time. For now if you don’t yet know about the wordpress meetups check it out at http://wpcapetown.wordpress.com or just google “wordpress cape town meetup” or something of the sort. Callum’s suggestion of using “wpcpt” as our master tag when refering to the local meetup is one I think we should go with.

    For starters the turnout and involvement was much better than meetup#1, though there are a few critical aspects of the meetup we now need to discuss going forward to make it something of real substance. Anyone interested in the attending the next one give me a shout. We’ll be putting together a planning team soon.

    Those who made it this time around were in no order of priority: ChrisM, Callum Macdonald, Henk Kleynhans, Adii, Foxini, Sarah, Selim Kagee, Nadah, Jamaal, Francois Raubenheimer, rafiq, Foxinni, Stelio, Johann Botha, Kilian Hagemann, Miguel, Frans Kuipers, Joe(amobia),

    At the meet Callum did a sterling job of drumming up excitement and getting people interacting. Well, errr, he tried his best and though there was a slow start we got a few sessions onto the white board for people to vote on. People were interested in chatting about WordPress MU, Using wordpress for social networks, Drupal comparison, Why wordpress, WordPress security, Plugins, WordPress 2.5

    There was a range of people at different levels of wordpress knowledge and experience so it was a bit tricky, I’d pitch myself in the middle somewhere between the complete newbies and the ultra wordpress geeks like Callum.

    I was particularly impressed by the way Nadah of work online, a complete wordpress newbie and sceptic from the first meetup, has quickly become a total enthusiast. She admits becoming somewhat of a blog junkie of late.

    Comparing Blogger, Moveable Type & WordPress, by Henk

    Henk hit us with an awesome session taking a critical look at 3 different blogging platforms and questioning the pros and cons of each. From where I’m standing wordpress comes out tops, though the others may have a point or 2 over wordpress on different levels. Henk currently runs at least 1 blog on wordpress, blogger and moveable type.

    I personally get a yucky feeling whenever I am faced with a blogger based blog and tend to stay away from them as much as possible. It has to have something to do with the fact that I’m a designer and a sucker for pretty looking things which blogger does not facilittate very well.

    I’m hoping we can get the PPT Henk put together to show you all, will have to ask him nicely.

    What’s your fav plugin

    The session broke out into a plugin show & tell with a few of us sharing plugin ideas and asking about plugins we’ve been wanting to get out hands on. I was off on a tangent about a plugin which allows you to manage sidebar content out of a specific post category or page though I don’t think I got my point across very well. We discussed some issues surrounding cache plugins including my recent disaster with WP Super cache and hope to get a recommended plugins list going. Chris recommended php speedy to help imrpove performance for high traffic sites.

    WordPress Security Issues

    One of the more technically focussed topics which were discussed was security. The concerns were voiced by those who are managing and hosting multiple installations of wordpress for clients or organisations. WordPress is known to be exploitable and there have been cases wherewell known sites have been hacked into and even hijacked completely. The discussion centred around updatability of multiple installs as well and the guys through a few suggestions around including working off the SVN codebase.

    The guys lost a few of of us along the way when they veered into ultra-geek mode.

  • mmm, Open Coffee on tomorrow at Origin Roasting 2pm in Cape Town.

    939875_66813630

    You might have noticed a post I recently wrote which took a look at the trend of drinking alcohol at Networking sessions and other web & entrepreneurial gatherings. Dave Duarte, the mind behind huddlemind.com, posted a comment suggesting I check out Open Coffee which takes place the first Thursday of every month.

    Tomorrow I will “God Willing” be attending my first Open Coffee. The event will be hosted at Origin Coffee Roasting and is organised by Eric Edelstein and Tim Shier.

    Arrive at 2pm on the first Thursday of every month. Bring your laptop if you want to do some work, or show people your site as there’s a wireless network.

    Work if you want… Or spend the time discussing ideas with other entrepreneurs.

    When? Thursday, Feb 7, 2008, 2:00 PM 20080207T120000Z

    Where? Origin Coffee Roasting, 28 Hudson Street De Watekant, Cape Town. call +27 (0)21 421 1000 for more info.

    Who? 13 members registered to attend

    If you have the time and value networking with entrepreneurs and web centric individuals pop around for a coffee and a chat!

  • 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.

    (more…)