There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 116 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

The Odysseus Medal competition — Voting for the People’s Choice Award is open

Only seven entries on the short list this week, but the long list was barely 25 posts. Vote for the People’s Choice Award here. You can use the voting interface to see each nominated post, so comparison is easy.

Ahem: Please don’t spam all your friends to come and vote for you. First, what we’re interested in is what is popular among people who would have been voting anyway. And second, I’ll eliminate you for cheating. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Voting runs through to 12 Noon MST Monday. I’ll announce the winners of this week’s awards soon thereafter.

Here is this week’s short-list of Odysseus Medal nominees:

< ?PHP $AltEntries = array ( "Jillayne Schlicke -- Mortgage fraud Recent Mortgage Fraud Developments and Future Outlook”,
“Tom Royce — Property taxes
Making the Seniors Work To Pay Off Property Taxes – Your Bloodsucking Government in Action“,
“Dustin Luther — Year in review A trip down the memory super-highway…“,
“Kris Berg — Happy holidays Happy Holidays!“,
“Todd Carpenter — Zillow mortgage Zillow Mortgage Prediction“,
“Dan Melson — Short sale Getting Another Mortgage Loan After A Short Sale“,
“Jeff Brown — Expert results Do Others Think Of You As An Expert? You Must Be Getting Results
);
shuffle($AltEntries);

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$num = count($AltEntries);
for ($i=0; $i< $num; $i++) { $pieces = explode("\t", $AltEntries[$i]); $radioGroup .= "

  • “;
    $radioGroup .= “$pieces[0], “;
    $radioGroup .= “$pieces[1]”;
    }

    echo (“

      $radioGroup

    “)
    ?>

    Deadline for next week’s competition is Sunday at 12 Noon MST. You can nominate your own weblog entry or any post you admire here.

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  • Updating WordPress for the New Year: Just because we’re living in an ethereal world, it doesn’t mean there’s no house-keeping

    I’m upgrading eight of the weblogs we host this weekend. That’s not all the weblogs we host, just the ones that are currently being maintained on at least a semi-regular basis. The single-property-web-sites we’ve done as weblogs are languishing in neglect.

    These are the blogs I’m hitting:

    • BloodhoundBlog.com
    • BloodhoundBlog.TV
    • BloodhoundRealty.com
    • DistinctivePhoenix.com
    • PRETExchange.com
    • RealEstateWeblogging101.com
    • TheBrickRanch.com
    • TooMuchVegas.com

    I’m bringing this up for two reasons.

    First, if you have privileges on any of those weblogs, watch for potentially significant changes between now and tomorrow morning. Two of them are running WP 2.0.10, and only one was running 2.3.1 until I started updating. Plus which, I’m updating and standardizing all the plug-ins. Let me know if you detect anything broken.

    Second, I need an easier way of doing this. I expect that WP Multi-User already does this, but sometime soon I’m going to see if I can make WordPress run multiple installations from something like a common code-base. In other words, I would like to be able to update eight (or more) weblogs with one FTP upload. I would like to be able to update a plug-in one time and have that update apply to every weblog we host. I’ve got a lot on my plate between now and Unchained, but I’ll see what I can come up with.

    And this entire post is a hint to you. This is a good time to look over your weblog and see what needs to be updated.

    In particular, the year is about to change. If you have the words “Copyright 2007” somewhere in your weblog (it’s often found in the footer), you can change that copy to this:

    Copyright <?php echo date('Y'); ?>

    The PHP “echo” command will echo the current year forever. You’ll never have to change the date again.

    Of the eight weblogs listed above, six are done. I have to go show and I don’t plan to do BHB and TheBrickRanch until late tonight, anyway. Should be duck soup, but if something looks hosed to you in the wee hours, tilt your head to the southwest and I’ll teach you how to swear.

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    Best of the worst: BloodhoundBlog’s most popular posts for 2007

    Here’s a comment that got deleted earlier tonight, a pearl of wisdom issued from one orifice or another by a less-than-brilliant pundit who chose to keep his or her identity concealed. The soul and substance of this partial portion of wit:

    this is easily the worst blog on the RE.net

    Todd Seavey wrote a brilliant essay this week on the nature of this kind of drive-by malice, but ours is a very special kind of misanthrope. For our anonymous abortive commenter is so well versed in the greater and the lesser, the better and the worse, the ridiculous and the sublime of the RE.net that he or she seems not to know that I coined the term ‘RE.net’.

    “Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.” Indeed. I know from a lifetime’s experience that I bring out the worst of the bad in people. That much requires no special effort on my part. I strive, when I remember to think about it, to bring out the best of the good in people, as well. And while BloodhoundBlog is not “easily the worst blog on the RE.net,” we have a colorable if not utterly incontestable claim to being the best of our breed. And if we are not beyond all doubt the very best, it is certainly not for the lack of effort.

    Witness: These are the top 25 most popular BloodhoundBlog posts for 2007, expressed in terms of hard clicks:

    1. What’s Wrong with zipRealty? by Russell Shaw
    2. HR 3915 Is Dangerous by Brian Brady
    3. HR 3915: Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act of 2007 by Brian Brady
    4. More on the iPhone… by Greg Swann
    5. Is the Subprime Mortgage Market the next Enron? by Brian Brady
    6. How to make Google your weblog’s best friend… by Greg Swann
    7. HARD MONEY: Life as a Legal Loan Shark by Brian Brady
    8. The Countrywide Federal Bailout Act of 2008 by Brian Brady
    9. 401(k)’s IRA’s & Urban Myths by Jeff Brown
    10. Redfin.com’s Real Estate Consumer’s Bill of Rights: A wolf in sheepskin clothing… by Greg Swann
    11. Game Time: What Are Your Favorite Real Estate Slogans? by Dan Green
    12. Subprime Loans Disappeared? Learn How to be a Hard Money Loan Broker by Brian Brady
    13. San Read more

    A potentially canonical list of weblog naming ideas

    I updated the potentially canonical list of real estate weblogs yesterday for the first time since June. One of the benefits of delay is that I get to see who didn’t make it in the long run, saving me some work. Hope is easy. Weblogging is hard.

    In any case, I added a form to the page to make it simpler (and, one may hope, quicker) to add, change or remove entries from the list.

    Here are two ideas that occurred to me while I was sifting through 3,000 un-dealt-with emails (of all sorts, not just real estate weblogs):

    1. Naming your weblog with an image instead of CSS-styled text is probably a bad idea. We’re guilty of this at DistinctivePhoenix.com, but it’s something I’ll fix the next time I go after that weblog in a big way.
    2. Naming your weblog with your most potentially-valuable keyword is probably a very good idea. Here we’re entirely off the reservation. With the exception of RealEstateWeblogging101.com, nothing I’ve ever done is right. But the value of having your most valuable keyword as your URL is so rich that it might be worth your while, if you don’t already have a lot of traction, to consider starting over with a new domain name.

    RealEstateWeblogging101.com is a complete category-killer, and Dave Smith is studying it extensively. It’s interesting to Dave because it’s built entirely in WordPress “Pages,” with almost no ordinary weblog message content.

    The name of that weblog is an image, also, not styled text, but, of course, the title of each post and the name of the weblog are encoded in the title tag of each page. There’s something else we’re doing on all of those pages: The title of each weblog post or WordPress “Page” is shown twice, once as the heading of the content and once on the “blackboard” at the top of the page. I don’t know if that is making a huge difference with Google, but it doesn’t seem to be hurting anything.

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    Speaking in tongues: Dynamically updated lists of links in PHP

    Let’s get dynamic, shall we? There are a lot of things you can say about PHP — and some of them are even safe for work. But, at bottom, PHP is a working stiff’s programming language for producing dynamic web pages.

    What’s a dynamic web page? It’s a page that reflects a user’s actions or editing without requiring manual editing of each little line of HTML. In the world of AJAX coding, web pages are becoming so dynamic that they seem to mimic the behavior of stand-alone complied applications. Calm down. We’re not going to do anything that sexy. And while we will actually be introducing real bona fide PHP programming in this post, you can dial down the palpitations: We will be doing precisely one line of PHP programming. Everything else will be familiar old HTML.

    Okay then: Go take a look at this article on HR 3915. Brian Brady wrote that post, and it was one of our most popular entries this year. BloodhoundBlog is the home of big stories on the RE.net, and, when we cover a big story, I do everything I can to make sure that readers — especially readers arriving from search engines or by hard clicks from non-RE.net sites — don’t miss the full extent of our coverage.

    So, if you scroll down in that post, you’ll see a bullet list of links to other posts with the heading “More on HR 3915.”

    That list of links is done with PHP.

    The actual list is simply a file of plain vanilla HTML — no PHP programming. The file for this list of links is called HR3915.php. It looks like this:

    &nbsp;<br>&nbsp;<br><B><I>More on HR
    3915:</I></B><UL>
    <li><a
    href="http://www.mortgageratesreport.com/2007/11/
    15/daily-kos-on-hr-3915-mortgage-industry-set-to"
    target="_blank">Daily Kos on HR 3915: Mortgage
    Industry Set To</a>
    <li><a
    href="http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/
    BloodhoundBlog/?p=2217" target="_blank">HR 3915:
    Why Federally-Chartered Banks Get The Pass</a>
    <li><a
    href="http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/
    BloodhoundBlog/?p=2200" target="_blank">HR 3915:
    Open Letter to Senator Dodd from a Veteran
    Mortgage Originator</a>
    <li><a
    href="http://www.mortgageratesreport.com/2007/11/
    08/hr-3915-legislating-to-armageddon"
    target="_blank">HR 3915- Legislating to
    Armageddon</a>
    <li><a
    href="http://blownmortgage.com/2007/11/07/hr-3915-
    mortgage-reform-bill-passes-committee-with-
    important-changes/" target="_blank">H.R. 3915
    Mortgage Reform Bill Passes Committee with
    Important Changes</a>
    <li><a
    href="http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/
    BloodhoundBlog/?p=2176" target="_blank">HR 3915:
    Anti-Consumer Bank Protection Act of 2007</a>
    <li><a
    href="http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/
    BloodhoundBlog/?p=2153" target="_blank">HR 3915:
    Exploring the Minds of the Enablers</a>
    <li><a
    href="http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/
    BloodhoundBlog/?p=2112" target="_blank">HR 3915 Is
    Dangerous</a>
    <li><a
    href="http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/
    BloodhoundBlog/?p=2103" target="_blank">HR 3915:
    Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act of
    2007</a>
    </UL>

    (It’s cleaner than that in real life. I had to introduce line breaks to keep it from screwing Read more

    Speaking in tongues: Presentable PHP in WordPress

    In the coming days, I plan to take up the idea of PHP for non-programmers, helping you tap the power of PHP’s dynamic text processing without learning (much) actual coding.

    The problem is that illustrating HTML or PHP in WordPress is always a problem. Why? Because WordPress eats code for breakfast. Properly-formatted coding looks to WordPress like… properly-formatted coding. Instead of a code example, you get the executed code itself.

    There are ways around this. I’ve used pictures in the past, or done elaborate searches to suss WordPress into showing the code sample as a code sample. But because I’m going to be showing a lot of code, and because I want for you to be able to copy and paste my examples into your own files, I built a tool (in PHP) to render PHP and HTML in a form that looks to WordPress like mere text, not code to be executed, but which will work just fine when you copy and paste it into your own files.

    Like this, as a very simple example:

    <html>
    <body>
    <p>Hello, World!</p>
    </body>
    </html>

    I’ve made my little toy available to you, if you want to play with it. You can use it to show coded examples to your own readers. It’s not doing any kind of error-trapping, but it’s not doing very much of anything. Let me know if you can break it.

    Building this was actually easier than talking about it, but there is a caveat. WordPress won’t love you if you try to go back and edit a published post that has one of these encoded examples in it. The second time through the WordPress parser, it will try to execute the code. The solution is either to write in and edit in an off-line editor like Ecto or to create your posts using coded examples in a text editor, editing your original files, rather than the published post. The point, either way, is to make sure that WordPress parses the coded examples only once before displaying them.

    I’ll have more shortly, but if you want to get a jump on things, do this: Copy the example code above and paste Read more

    The Odysseus Medal: “Until we start fixing what is really wrong we’ll continue to struggle in quicksand”

    The story of the year is the lending crisis, so it’s no accident that this week’s Odysseus Medal should go to Morgan Brown for Struggling in Quicksand – Why the Government Continues to Exacerbate the Problem:

    So here’s the rub – all of these “do gooders” are making the situation exponentially worse. Their rash actions are actually making it HARDER to get financing. Witness the spreads in jumbo vs. conforming loan amounts. Witness the restriction of loan programs. Witness the increase in underwriting stipulations. Witness the interbank rates compared to the Fed. The fact is that all of these bail out programs (which they all are in one form or another) have added MORE uncertainty to the system. They have not improved the psyche of the people with the money. And those are the people that count right now. If the people who hold the cash don’t want to lend it because their return is unclear we’ll never see the calming of the mortgage market.

    The idea is not to make Fannie and Freddie buy everything in sight; the idea is to make the mortgage market a transparent and friendly investing environment so that cash returns to the secondary markets (and debt markets in general). Will that take time to work out? Absolutely. Are any of these rash knee-jerk reactions improving the situation? Not at all. We shouldn’t be worrying about how to bail out responsible people. We should be looking at how to fix the credit and debt markets to provide transparency for investors. Transparency builds credibility. Credibility builds confidence. Confidence drives investment. Investment drives down costs of borrowing, increases program expansion and makes markets healthy.

    Until we start fixing what is really wrong we’ll continue to struggle in quicksand.

    Krista Baker takes this week’s Black Pearl Award with How To Create Your 2008 Business and Marketing Plan:

    Identify the gaps. Now that you’ve documented where you are and where you want to be, where are the gaps? For instance, if you made $50,000 in 2007 and want to make $100,000 in 2008, what does that mean? First, $50,000/12 = approx $4200. If you want Read more

    Two changes to the About page to clarify BloodhoundBlog’s praxis

    I made two changes to our About page, both of them to clear up potential ambiguities.

    The first grew out of a comment from Cheryl Johnson concerning the content of BloodhoundBlog and the possible consequences of Realtors or lenders emulating our outspokenness on their own weblogs:

    Verbum sapienti: A word to the wise, that is. We are a real estate industry weblog, and much of our content concerns real estate marketing tools, technologies and techniques that real estate professionals might use in their own businesses. But: We are not appealing for business here. We are not selling real estate or loans or investments, and we are not walking on our tip-toes to avoid offending potential clients. If you are building or hope to build a lead-attracting real estate weblog, BloodhoundBlog is not a model for you to follow. Many of our contributors have client-focused weblogs, and those can be good models to work from. In addition, we wrote a book called Real Estate Weblogging 101 that explains how to build a successful real estate weblog. But BloodhoundBlog is written to be controversial, and we do not — and should not — care whose toes we might step on.

    The second is an amendment to our comments policy to clarify what kind of conduct results in a comment being deleted or a commenter being banned from BloodhoundBlog. In this paragraph, the added language is underlined:

    Comments policy: Everyone disagrees with us about something, and we welcome this: It’s how we learn. We encourage a free and spirited debate about the issues we raise here. We police comments with a very light hand, deleting comments and banning commenters only for extreme obscenity, flaming or flame-baiting, plagiarism, spam, impersonation (sock-puppetry) or copyright infringement (a fair-use quotation with a link is fine). This warrants emphasis: We are all about ideas, and, because of that, we are very strict about bad behavior. If you get the notion that your fear or anger or rock-ribbed moral fire accords you the right to abuse or insult or brow-beat the other guests in our salon, you will be ejected with dispatch. Nota bene: Read more

    Time of the signs: Let there be light

    This is my column for last week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link). Since I wrote this, Cathleen found a solar-powered flood light solution, which we’re testing now. At some point — ideally when there is more sunlight and when electrons aren’t quite as sluggish outdoors — I’ll let you know how it’s working out.

     
    Time of the signs: Let there be light

    We’ve been playing with sign lights.

    Signs matter. If you’re trying to sell your home, the yard sign just might swing the balance. A whopping 63% of home buyers discover homes they’re interested in seeing from yard signs, and the sign can be the first “salesman” for the home in one out of every six home sales.

    Our signs are custom-made for each home we list, with big photos of the interior of the home. The idea is to swing the balance toward our sellers by whatever means we can think of.

    But I cannot imagine a more profound enemy of custom real estate signs than darkness. During the day, you can spot the signs, see the photos, read the copy. At night, our signs, like all real estate signs, are silhouettes against the void.

    So we’ve been looking for lighting systems that will extend the hours our signs are visible — from twilight to 9 pm at least, although all night would be ideal.

    Our first swing at the ball is a device called the Listing Light. It uses six C-cell batteries to set two light-emitting diodes ablaze. It actually works in the sense that the signs seem to be aglow from a distance, and they are completely readable up close. But the effect is a lot like reading by flash-light — doable, but not to be preferred.

    My friend Teri Lussier, a Realtor in Dayton, Ohio, has set her husband loose on the problem of lighting signs. His first invention builds the lights into the underside of the crossbar of the sign post. By now, he’s playing with the idea of building a box composed of two translucent signs with fluorescent tubes inside, much like a commercial sign.

    I like what ground-mounted flood lights do Read more

    Unchained melodies: Christmas Eve Sarajevo 12/24

    Trans-Siberian Orchestra is the most successful of the many attempts to marry classical music to rock, with Christmas Eve Sarajevo 12/24 being their breakthrough hit:

    It ain’t Christmas without the Barenaked Ladies. This is their Christmas medley with Sarah MacLachlan:

    Dan Fogelberg died on December 16th of this year. This is Same Auld Lang Syne, the all time best Christmas Eve song ever written:


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