Category: Technology (page 48 of 60)

by Kris Berg

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

I can go home happy now. In just one short morning spent in the Palace Hotel Gold Room, I learned how to write the Perfect Blog. No one person has the answer, of course, but by aggregating the wisdom shared by the collective mind of the blogging greats who spoke to us this week, I have the fail safe recipe for blogging infamy and success. I won’t name names, but following are the essential ingredients according to the blogging Who’s Who:

1. Blogs should be short. Readers are Scanners (they are busy, busy people), and five paragraphs in size is the ABSOLUTE MAX. Otherwise, you will… What was I saying? Oh, yeah. You’ll lose your… What do you call them? Readers. Do I smell pot roast?
2. Avoid being self-congratulatory. No particularly reason given, but we can take the leap that nobody likes a braggart. As one who has never been recognized nor been the recipient of a prestiguous honor, ever, I totally agree.
3. Focus on the consumers, not on the agents. The consumers should never see healthy discourse among agents. Where’s the fun in that? Much better to have a site where you receive, oh, zero comments on a lengthy (five paragraph MAX) position statement on the value of hiring a top-producing neighborhood specialist. If people enjoyed voyeurism and lurking, they would frequent porn sites.
4. Make sure your title and your content are Keyword Rich. Whether you aspire to dominate San Diego real estate or the picnic catering industry in Maricopa County, you should pick words that work toward that end. An expert who does this stuff for a living said (and I am not making this up) that, within 6 months, my blog should be getting 2,000 unique visitors a day. After 15 months, I am just 1974 shy of that number. (Self derogatory comment alert! 5 Bonus Points awarded for achieving #2 above).
5. Use tons and gobs and bizillions of pictures. See #1 above (Technorati Tag: Attention Deficit Disorder).
6. Use Technorati Tags. See #3 above. The consumers are all searching on Technorati for the best real estate agent in (name your city). The guy who lives Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Okay, start here. I had an idea for an organic method of collecting arguments, pro and con, about divorcing real estate commissions. Using a PHP form, I could collect user-submitted links to apposite articles, then show them all in an “included” PHP file in each post about divorced commissions. That PHP file would be available to be included on other sites, as well, although I don’t think anyone has done this.

I’ve manually built this kind of file before, for ongoing news stories and for breaking news stories we cover in multiple posts. The difference here was eliciting contributions from readers in a semi-automated fashion.

Last night in a comment, Barrett Niehus of 4MySales – Real Estate Investment and Marketing commended me for having added a Wiki to BloodhoundBlog.

Except I hadn’t done that. I wasn’t even sure what Barrett was talking about. By email, I asked for clarification, and this was his response:

The Wiki comment just relates to the Bloodhound’s ability to add posted links from your online form to the list that you are creating on your blog post. For your readers (me included) this adds another way for them to participate in your blog. I think it is a great feature that few other bloggers use which makes your blog even more unique.

For a one-off post, it made a certain kind of sense. But imagine the same idea expressed globally, for every post. Now that’s an insanely great idea.

I planted a seed, really just a way of seeking something like permanence in the evanescent world of weblog posts. Barrett saw more than I did, a little bit of that Web 2.0-ishness, and his email led me back to see a tiny sprout springing up from the earth. Tonight I’ve nurtured it into a little sapling. I honestly don’t know if people will use something like this, but it seems to me to be a fantastic way to make BloodhoundBlog’s posts more comprehensive and informative.

What am I talking about? New code that will permit you to amend any post on BHB with supplemental links. If you look at Lani’s post from earlier Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Dustin had a post last night that made me rethink the ideas I posted the other day on using a cookie to modify a WordPress.org weblog’s default behavior for first-time visitors.

Clear as mud?

Starting with version 2.0, WordPress introduced the idea of an optional intro.php file that would be a sticky first post. In other words, the file, truly a pseudo-post, could be shown first to every reader who landed on the top-level page of the weblog. That way, you can do all your welcoming house-keeping with new users.

Too cool. What’s the problem? Most people showing up at your weblog are not new users, so you’re going to hammer that intro.php nail into their heads again and again.

And Dustin raised another problem: Many people arriving at your weblog for the first time will be coming in from search engines, from your RSS feed or from deep links on other sites. Those folks are never going to see intro.php, because they won’t enter the weblog from the top level.

The code I wrote the other day solved both of these problems, but with a one-size-fits-all solution. What if you want to issue a special introduction only to top-level first-time visitors? What if you want to address only those people coming in via deep links into your weblog? What if you want to say something different to each type of visitor?

I amended the code today to take account of these two different entry scenarios. Using this version you can have an intro.php file for people who enter your weblog for the first time through the front page. The cookie associated with that expires in 60 days, so that only people who have been away for a long while will see it more than once.

You can also have another file called singlePostIntro.php (or whatever) for people who come in via a hard click from a search engine, an RSS feed or another web site. That cookie lasts for two weeks. The point is to address infrequent visitors who come in via deep links differently, in the hopes of persuading them to become subscribers.

You can see this Read more