Nur Ahmad Furlong

Blog

  • 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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  • 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.

  • Web Guru Spotlight 2: Chris Garrett – Pro blogger and online media strategist

    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.

    Web Guru Spotlight: Chris Garrett, professional blogger and online media strategist

    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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  • 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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  • The coolest Eco Footprints I’ve seen

    The coolest Eco Footprints I’ve seen

    When we talk about carbon footprints we think about those forms we fill in online which ask us all kinds of probing questions about our homes, our cars and our activities which impact the planet. William McDonough’s book cradle to cradle discusses the concept of re-thinking how we design things extensively and gives us a new way of looking into the future of product design.

    This is an eco-footprint of another kind which makes fantastic use of the concept of recyclability and re-usability in an ultr-cool way. Like McDonough states in his book over & over eco-friendly design does not have to be boring or less brilliant in functionality or visual appeal to fullfill it’s ecological responsibilities. It’s about the design approach.

    Designer: Ben Chappell, has taken up the challenge with a not completely original but very much unique sneaker design which embraces the cradle to cradle thinking fully. The “Think” sneaker, a fully modular, meaning it’s made of seperate parts which can be removed & replaced, recyclable shoe.

    The Think sneaker - Designed by Ben Chappell, eco-footprint of the future

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  • Blog Action Day 2007 a huge success

    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.

    Blog Action Day 2007

    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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