Realespace

I’ve always been a little bit “wanting more” for wordpress admin section. Soon there will be a new admin section that looks pretty nice (from playing with the demo).

In general I think 2.5 to 2.6 was a much bigger roleout do to the new media interface and functions, but 2.7 has much better useability in the place you spend the most time while blogging.

Here is a good slideshow of how the admin section was designed and tested.
Slideshare presentation (61 slides)

If you want to try the demo: Talkpress.de (demo)
Notice there is no plugin directory. This is because it is a WPMU site and they have disabled plugins. The slideshow shows plugins in the left navigation menu.

Not sure what inbox is. Here is an explanation of it. Sounds a little like a friendfeed.

For those early adopters, here are the files from automattic.

http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/branches/

I just got this email for a domain I own with Yahoo.com

Dear Matt Dunlap,

Thanks for using Yahoo! Domains. We’re writing to remind you that it’s time for the annual autorenewal of your service.

Your Domains plan, associated with the domain domain_name.com, will renew on 07/07/2008. If your billing information is up-to-date, there’s no need to do a thing (except keep enjoying your service).

Important note: Beginning on July 1, 2008, Yahoo!’s annual domain renewal price increases to $34.95 per year.

You can verify your billing information by visiting yahoo billing and clicking the Update link next to your plan. Click the gray Edit button to the right of your payment method to review your payment details.

(Please note that the billing center will not reflect the new $34.95 domain-renewal price until July 1. Until that time, you will continue to see the old renewal price next to your plan.)

Best regards,

You have to be joking right? Is this a current trend in domain names? Is it because I have owned it for 5 years and it renews every year?

This is completely unacceptable. to jump from $9.95 a year to $34.95 a year, especially in a time that domain name are so easy to register for cheap, really shows where Yahoo.com is heading.

Thanks for the heads-up Yahoo, I will transfer be to a new registrar soon.

All I can say is try it…

You’re not going to find anything useful, but the concept isreally cool. Millions of blogs posts streaming to your computer screensaver as the world spins around. My laptop could not handle the screensaver. It was really jittery, but they do have a standard mode you can open from your start menu which was nice and smooth.

Source: http://twingly.se/ScreenSaver.aspx

I like the ideas of information getting spread on sources outside of normal paths. There is another screensaver that I like called Electricsheep. Electricsheep is open source and allows anyone to create animations for it.

Source: http://electricsheep.org/

You have been told over and over that blogging is the key to building your online business, and then a report like this comes out. Simply put, people trust their peers first and blogger least.

Who do people trust? (It ain’t bloggers)
I’ve been spending more and more time pouring over data, medium usage, behavioral and preference data for clients, and am learning more and more about how humans behave on the web.

So who do people trust? Three research studies indicate it’s peers, or people they know. And social clout from bloggers, or those with a lot of online friends ain’t it.
Source: The Web Strategist - Jeremiah Owyang

This hits real estate bloggers hard, and further demonstrates how real estate is all about relationships.

So, is your blog worthless? Of Course not, but you need to focus more time on getting a following, building that trust with your readers. Tested factors still set many guidelines for marketing. You are all using your blog to market, so your blog falls into the same guidelines. New visitors to your blog probably will not contact you for business. Just like people that get your postcards, or newsletters in the mail will not contact you. The last I heard, it takes eight postcards, or pieces of direct mail to get a response.

Most blogs die in just a few months, well before they get any type of following, and the sad thing it, they die because they have no following. Make sense?

So stick with it, and focus more on touching people (virtually) and you will build trust much faster then just blogging about your market stats

Blogging for Personal Branding id a slideshare show that teaching you how to blog. Trisha is an expert blogger that has taken her career to new levels. Trish Okubo is the disruptive innovator for Ebay and founded Omiru.com

Don’t be scared the 326 slides, They are very well planned and you click through them in only a couple minutes. The slides were made for the web 2.0 expo.

10 Steps overview

1. Pick a topic that is uniquely you
2. Stand for something real - If you don’t love it, don’t blog about it
3. Be newsworthy
4. Be awesome!
5. Create a stoplist
6. Build real relationships
7. Meet people in person
8. Make it easy to spread the word
9. Create community wherever you go
10. Be patient

This is really good stuff, and I see a few that I need to work on immediately.

I just noticed a new little feature over at Techcrunch. At the very bottom of the pages there is a new widget to add video comments. The provider of the video player/editor is Seesmic, which is only accepting alpha subscribers to their service, so don’t expect to see many video comments just yet…since there are that many accounts.

Cool stuff, we all know you can say anything when not held accountable. This is especially true when commenting on blog posts. Video will definitely get more click backs to your site from the comment section.

Most Wordpress themes use pages for navigation. This is fine for most single user blogs, but when you want to really start expanding what Wordpress can do, look at using categories for your main navigation.

Both pages and categories are parent - child based, meaning you can create a top level category and then create categories under that main category. For an example of navigation with top level categories and sub categories, go to money.cnn.com/real-estate. Most media, or newspaper based websites use this format, and will really open up the possibilities of your blog.

I would not recommend starting with this format without any content. Make sure you have several posts. This type of blog needs a lot of content. They do not have to be well categorized because you can always change the categories. But if you are starting out and have no content, the first thing to do is organize your categories.

If you want to try out the code, just make a couple parent categories and then make a couple subcategories.

go to your theme folder and open header.php. comment out wp_list_pages(), and add the code below

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$defaults = array(
'show_option_all' => '',
'orderby' => 'name',
'order' => 'ASC',
'show_last_update' => 0,
'style' => 'list',
'show_count' => 0,
'hide_empty' => 0,
'use_desc_for_title' => 1,
'child_of' => 0,
'feed' => '',
'feed_image' => '',
'exclude' => '',
'hierarchical' => true,
'title_li' => '',
'echo' => 1,
'depth' => 1
);
 
wp_list_categories($defaults);

This will list only the top level categories. We do not want to display subcategories until we have clicked on a top level category. You do not need to list all defaults, but you do need to set depth to 1 in order to only show parent categories and set the title_li to nothing.

For more information about wp_list_categories click here

The next step is to display the subcategories when we have chosen a top level category. This is a little tricky because we have to get the category id for the parent category from the first post in that category.

directly after the main navigation make a subnavigation and add this code:

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$cat = get_the_category();
$id = $cat[0]->parent;
 
$defaults = array(
'show_option_all' => '',
'orderby' => 'name',
'order' => 'ASC',
'show_last_update' => 0,
'style' => 'list',
'show_count' => 0,
'hide_empty' => 0,
'use_desc_for_title' => 1,
'child_of' => $id,
'feed' => '',
'feed_image' => '',
'exclude' => '',
'hierarchical' => true,
'title_li' => '',
'echo' => 1,
'depth' => 1
);
 
if($parents[0]->parent && !is_home())
{
echo "
<ul>". wp_list_categories($defaults) ."</ul>
";
}

The above code first gets the category of the first post in the main category. Then gets the parent id. Then in defaults we set the child_of to the id of the parent. This will get us all children of the main category. We do not want to show any children categories on the home page and if there are no posts we do not want to show any children categories.

That is all that is needed to make a category based navigation. I find it give many more options for your blog. To really customize your blog, you can make separate php files for each category. There is a category hierarchy Wordpress looks for.

1. category-id.php - id = category id (6)
2. category.php - this will handle all categories
3. archives.php - this is probably used the most
4. index.php - last but not least

I stumbled another great firefox plugin recently called stylish.It let’s you change the look of any website including google, yahoo, gmail…anything.

Sample gmail skinned:

You can download full styles, or create your own and upload them for others to use. It’s a lot of fun.

Start be grabbing the Stylish Firefox extension

After you install it, you can go to userstyles.org to grab styles. There are user styles for all the major websites. Warning though, if you use a skin that is heavy with graphics, it will slow the site down. The gmail example above is really slow.

If you want to style your own website, rather someone else’s website, go to Tools > add-ons in the Firefox menu and click on Options for the stylish add-on

By clicking on Options you will open up the editor. Click on Write to start a new website. In this example I choose Activerain.com. I chose activerain because 1. it is a blank canvas with not a lot of styling, and 2. there is a new activerain customizer which is pretty cool.The activerain customizer is built by danko web design, and they did a great job!

It is really simple to change main html tags like body, a, table, etc… but if you really want to customize it, you have to get the CSS stylesheet. To get the stylesheet from any website, do a View Source and look for a link tag in the head. if this is not making any sense, simply do a search for “stylesheet” and you should find it. Open that link in your browser and you should see the styles.

There will be a lot of styles, so you might want to grab another firefox extension called the web developer toolbar, which will allow you to mouseover different locations on the website and see what the style id or class is.

Here is activerain.com after I styled it

Some things to note about styling other websites.

1. html tags with class are identified with a period in the stylsheet. Example: .main_header
2. html tags with id’s are identified with a # in the stylsheet. Example: #main_header
3. you need to add “!important” after any line in the stylesheet to override the original CSS
4. to overide only one site, you must include @-moz-document domain(”activerain.com”) {}. All additional styles must go into the brackets or else every website that has the same class and id’s will change.
5. here is a link to a CSS tutorial if you need to learn more about styles

The iGoogle team announced today that they have extended the iGoogle api and introduced some new features.

The three new features are:

1. updated navigation, similar to the Facebook app menu
2. new canvas setting so application can take up more screen real estate, similar to Facebook’s canvas page
3. friend update widget, similar to the Facebook update notifications

As you can see, iGoogle has Facebook in the crosshairs with open social as their weapon, and frankly, Facebook should be scared.

Actually, Wordpress, Six Apart, Facebook, and even smaller collaboration software vendors that have utilized Open Social should be scared. When Open Social was first announce, we installed the shindig server to integrate Open Social with all the blogs we develop. Each blog network using Wordpress Multi-user would be an Open Social container.

The idea was put on the back burner of our development because of two things, mainly the OpenSocial server (Shindig) was not very good. Open Social was announce with the intent that developers would make widgets for existing networks such as Ning, and Orkut, not making all new newtworks. Secondly, Wordpress actually has very good plugin system, that can be extended, although not a lot of developers do.

For Example,
when a developer writes a plugin, that plugin can then be extended by other developers by the use of hooks and actions. Our RateWindow™ widget is an example of this. Once a user installed the RateWindow™ application on their site, other developers can access hooks within the RateWindow™ widget. The RateWindow™ application comes with a built in e-newsletter application that can be used be the owner of the widget to brand themselves via email. We have developed a property listing widget that can be used with the RateWindow™ widget. Not only does recent blog posts get sent in the e-newsletter, but the Realtors listings, profile, and any other plugin that “Hooks up” to RateWindow.

If you not a developer, this probably makes no sense, so let’s just put it this way. All your blog plugins can communicate with each other and extend your branding. For more information contact me, I’d love to bore you with the details.

The major drawback with using Wordpress plugins as a make shift Open Social application distribution is that the Wordpress database is completely wide open because of similar naming conventions and the Wordpress database classes. Any developer can use simple code to grab anything from the database and exploit it.

I’m a big fan of Wordpress, and will continue to develop for the Wordpress platform, but today marks a big change in our thinking and development. The ideals of community building and collaboration are changing and

Mark Warner, CEO of Realespace was invited on Real Estate Radio to discuss the current state of the mortgage industry. He also introduced RateWindow™ to the public with access to our online demo.

RateWindow™ is Realespace’s first major product and is currently finishing up a private beta.

RateWindow™ is the first transparent loan pricing program on the market today and it’s setting a new standard in mortgage lending. Why? Because with RateWindow™, customers get to know that they really will get the best deal—because they choose it themselves.