Nur Ahmad Furlong

Blog

  • What does the communications agency of the future look like?

    When companies, organisations and even individuals want to get a message out to the public or some specific target audience, they approach a number of different types of companies & professionals to assist them in doing so.

    These range from PR consultancies to advertising agencies, branding agencies, media companies, new media, event managers, design studios and general communications consultancies.

    question-iconWhat influences companies to use a specific type of communication? Why do certain companies naturally gravitate towards PR rather than new media, or above the line rather than direct marketing? It’s not always the appropriateness but sometimes they just haven’t thought about anything else. It also seems there is a fear to reach out in new ways.

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  • WordPress 2.5 has hit the shelves – I’ve just upgraded

    So finally, and with a day to spare before the end of the month the much hyped and long awaited wordpress 2.5 is officially available for download as a “stable” release and it’s looking like it’s packed with alot more value than expected. I’m going through the motions right now of backing up, and getting ready to take that brave upgrade step.

    If you visit the wordpress.org website you’ll notice a slight brand refresh and you can feel the distinct touch the Happy Cog guys have added to the interface as well as in the admin panel where the user interface has seen a significant upgrade.

    The development team have been hard at work putting all their efforts into creating a much more user friendly and feature packed product which I’m sure will make lots of wordpress enthusiasts and newbies alike very happy. Something I’m looking forward to testing out, especially with some recent problems experienced on a client site is the a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code. Here’s what the release page has to say:

    WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.

    I’ve just upgraded and am already impressed by some of the features, especially so the automatic upgrade of plugins which I’ve taken full advantage of. Make sure you follow every step of the upgrade process in order and you do full backups of your db and site files. Good luck to all upgraders.

  • 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.

  • Miraculously my Categories have returned?

    So my cats are back in the wordpress hat!

    After some trouble with my comments going walkies, it seems all is well again in nomad-one land. Turns out the problem was caused by some quota limit which caused some plugin problems and not the plugins themselves so WP Super Cache and friends, my apologies. Donncha was kind enough to point out that the WP Super Cache plugin doesn’t have any code which can access the categories db at all. The WP-DBManager plugin by Lester Chan came in handy and allows you to repair damaged database tables, back-up and restore your database and generally manage and keep your wordpress db in tip-top shape. I recommend it highly as it helped me restore some data which seemed to have been lost.

    I’m at a loss for words right now and am hoping and praying that I will find a solution other than having to re-categorize my entire sites posts. Something randomly went wonky with my WP Super Cache Plugin which forced me to disable and then delete it. The result was total loss of post categorization, tagging references as well as loss of my entire blogroll.

    If anyone has a solution out there please let me know, I might even reward you if I can manage it. Be very very careful with plugins and remember to keep a regular backup, my last backup is more than a month old. Also export your blog content to an xml file regularly which will allow you to import it all into a new installation should you need to do so.

    YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!

  • What’s the whole buzz about WordPress 2.5?

    As you may have heard WordPress 2.5, the much hyped upgrade from 2.3 skipping 2.4 has been delayed for more than the promised week. I don’t know much about what they’ll be doing with the new release and took a little peak at the demo site.

    So what is really different about WordPress 2.5

    Admin Interface Re-design

    The admin area of wordpress has seen a significant overhaul, not so much in functionality as far as I can tell, but in terms of the user-interface and design with a few added extras. Here’s hoping it works faster than the existing one as I find one of the issues is the loading time with my limited bandwidth. I logged into the 2.5 demo site and poked around a little taking a few pics.

    Here’s a few screens of the admin interface

    Wordpress 2.5 Dashboard re-designed

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  • VeloCITI Session #1: Getting our Values in order

    For the 15 start-up businesses chosen to be on the VeloCITI 2008 program, today, March 18, was a truly inspirational and profoundly introspective day.

    See more about What VeloCITI is?

    We started off at 9 waking up to cups of coffee and a round of congratulating each other for making it onto the program. It was great seeing the familiar faces from the bridging course 2 weeks ago and re-connecting. I feel this year will unlock some really special relationships and it seems it already has.

    We were introduced to Judit from PeerPower, our facilitator and mentor for the day who was later joined by Mignon(PeerPower). I think I can speak for all when I say we were rearing to go and eager to find out what the topic of focus for the day would be.

    Introducing ourselves

    First off we completed a quick introductions/interview exercise in which we each interviewed one of our VeloCITI peers and had to introduce them to the team. We then focused on setting some guidelines going forward in terms of rules of engagement and how we as a group think we would need to work together to produce the best results within the team over the next 7 – 8 months.

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