Realespace

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.

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.

I have been writing down ways to get your blog more traffic for an upcoming blog posts. I was looking around for tools that allowed a blog author to add their most recent blog posts to the signature of their emails. I could not find any so I wrote up a little script that does it. It is a Thunderbird extension, so if you use outlook, you will have to keep searching.

Thunderbird is a free email client built by the guys that brought you Firefox, and like Firefox, you can build extensions for it easily.

Let’s get to it.

Download the extension here: blogpoststosig2@matt.dunlap.xpi

Then in Thunderbird, go to Tools > add-ons and click install. This will open a file browser…find my extension and install it. Thunderbird will restart automatically.

After Thunderbird restarts, go to tools > add-ons again and click on options for the extension. You need to specify your blog feed.

Your done. Next time you go to write an email, in Tools, you will see

Below is my email signature with my 5 most recent blog posts

Pretty simple with lots of room for improvement. Feel free to take the code and extend. I would like to extend it to automatically find the email signature and insert the recent blog posts automatically. Any other suggestions are welcome.

Wordpress 2.5 was released a day ago complete with a new admin theme (Similar to Wordpress.org) which tries to simplify the admin section and let the blog owner “just write”. I really like the backend, and especially the new theme widget section. The presentation section has been renamed to Design but other then that it looks the same.

They also removed one of the most annoying bugs since wordpress became a true content manager. This was the CSS styling problem with the static pages. Ever since wordpress released the functionality to add a static front page, the navigation menu had a bug in which the static page did not get the proper class tag of current_page_item. If you have a tabbed navigation or any other navigation that displayed differently on active pages, your static page would not work, and look like a non-active page. There were many hacks for this issue, but bottom line it was a pain. Wordpress 2.5 has fixed this bug.

Wordpress has not updated their multi-user product, and will probably not happen for a while since the support is lacking for MU.

Techcrunch covered the release yesterday and many comments stated that Wordpress development is focusing on aspects of the product that are not making it better, while other platforms are. I disagree. I like the new product and the simplicity of the product. Wordpress started as a simple blog tool and and added a simple CMS option (Static pages) and dominated more impressive CMS platforms like Mambo and Joomla. Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer seems to be focused on bringing more media options to Wordpress. He takes many photos, so it is not a surprise that one of the biggest features to Wordpress 2.5 is the image gallery.

Another very cool feature is the automatic plugin updater. Not only does it notify you when a plugin has a new release but will upgrade in one click.

All Wordpress 2.5 features and improvements

Download Wordpress 2.5

I recently did a keyword analysis for flat-fee home loans and the results really startled me. There is a huge competition for keywords associated with flat fee home loans and and mortgages.

The image above shows how much competition is in this field, or how much mortgage brokers are spending on these keywords to get business. YET, the keywords are hardly searched for…

This is a great case for why the RateWindow™ Flat Fee Mortgage application is such a great tool for mortgage brokers. Our widget engine allows mortgage brokers to put the application on any website, for free without spending any additional dollars for online marketing. It also allows the mortgage broker to establish good online relationships between websites.

The Consumer has spoken, and we listened
The consumer is looking for honest, transparent mortgage brokers and mortgage products. The consumer will demand tools like this as word gets out that you don’t have to be in the dark when buying, or refinancing a home. The more demand, the higher those keywords above will go. It will be very important that mortgage brokers and real estate agents, get the RateWindow™ application on there site becuase the consumer will be looking for it

This brings us to another benefit for the widget.

The RateWindow™ widget co-brands with any website it is placed on. The Realespace widget platform handles all the hard work.

Bottom line, this widget will save mortgage brokers advertising costs and provide additional marketing benefits for both the mortgage broker and the owner of any website the Ratewindow™ application is on.

Signup for the RateWindow™ Application at RateWindow.com

With the release of Firefox 3, which according to ZDnet: Firefox 3 Beta 4 is 5x faster than IE7, 3x faster than FF2 right around the corner, I can see a huge move towards the Firefox browser. I use Firefox all the time, which is actually very bad from a developer standpoint. It is not smart to develop a website, then fix all the IE 6/7 errors, but many web designers do it.

That is a huge difference, and to be honest, I find the results hard to believe. Another thing is IE6 is not listed, and as of this writing IE6 is installed on more computers then IE7 according to w3schools.com.

IE6: 30.7%
IE7: 22%
FF: 36.5%

Below is a list of my top development add-ons.

1. Web Developer Toolbar - I use this the most, especially for the CSS tools. You can edit CSS directly on the webpage you are looking at. It does not save the changes but you can find issues easily. You can view cookie info, and other stored data. View Metadata is good for when you want to check your SEO of the site. It quickly shows your meta keywords and description.
2. MeasureIt - Simply adds a ruler overlay on a webpage. Useful for getting a width and height of content boxes.
3. Fireshot - Takes full webpage screenshots. There are very few free full website screenshots and even less that are firefox extensions. This actually comes with a full set of image tool. I mostly copy the full webpage directly to my clipboard and then edit in PhotoShop.
4. ColorZilla - Eyedropper that grabs colors colors from webpages. Also includes a full color browser/picker

Realespace is proud to announce the Ratewindow™ widget for mortgage professionals, real estate agents, and most important, the consumers of mortgage products. Ratewindow™ is a plugin “widget” that functions like an interactive Web 2.0 application on a any website. RateWindow™ is setting a new standard in mortgage lending.

Using the widget, a mortgage shopper can produce a simple, clean and honest quote based on a mortgage’s wholesale par rate without broker manipulation.

RateWindow™ provides the consumer the same information that is available to loan officers in a simple, easy-to-understand format. It also meets all state and federal disclosure regulations to ensure that you have all of the information that you need to make your best decision.

Screenshots:
[GALLERY=1]
We are looking for 3 types of beta testers…

1. Mortgage Professionals.
   Mortgage brokers always need to differentiate themselves. Certain transaction fees based on the Yield Spread Premium can be hidden from the consumer, and some brokers manipulate these fees to provide a negotiation edge or pad profit. No national mortgage brokerage has created a marketing position based on the full disclosure flat fee loan model.Simply create an account, and then put the widget on as many websites as you wish. Create relationships with real estate agents to provide industry leading technology to consumers.
2. Real Estate Agents / Website Owners.
   Realtors are now able to provide a one stop home search and mortgage product search to their website. Our new technology brings the transparency to the real estate market the consumers have been asking for. The application allows potential clients to shop for mortgage products from your website without ever leaving the website! The Application also co-brands all email results when the consumer pulls rates.If you own a large real estate community website, brokerage, or property listing service and you think that RateWindow™ will provide additional features and benefits that your clients demand, please contact the Ratewindow™ Support Group for more information about partnering with Realespace and deploying the RateWindow™ tool into your website
3. Consumers.
   Demand that your mortgage broker uses RateWindow™. There is no other way to be 100% sure you are getting the absolute best mortgage products for your needs. If you are currently looking for a mortgage product, contact the RateWindow™ support team and we will put you in contact with the RateWindow™ mortgage tool immediately.

Technically speaking:

The RateWindow™ plugin is not just a simple advertising widget but a full application that can be added to ANY website with just ONE line of code. Yes…That is correct, ONE line of code adds a full mortgage application that pulls up-to-date mortgage rates without ever leaving the host website. It becomes part of the website and is fully styleable with CSS to blend in seamlessly with your websites’ look and feel.

• Wordpress Plugin - Just upload and activate.
• Javascript version - Copy and Paste one line of code to any website
• Automatically co-brands between the mortgage professional (widget owner) and the website (widget container) providing FREE advertising for real estate agents or any other website that displays the widget
• Up-to-date loan rates that cannot be manipulated!
• Email Verification - spam and robot proof.
• Custom Debt-to-Income calculator for accurate results
• Only 13 fields in the form makes for easy loan requests. You don’t have to give away all your personal information

At first sight it makes absolutely no sense and you wonder how hard it would be to operate, but from a usability standpoint it makes a lot of sense. The Lucid technology keeps your hands out of the way when working with touchscreen.

more information at the Microsoft research website. This website provides a useful look at managing a GPS device with lucid technology

At Techfest 2008, Microsoft showed off a touch-screen technology for mobile devices which it developed with Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs. Lucid Touch solves some of the problems of small screen devices by allowing the user to hold it with two hands and use their fingers to navigate underneath a transparent screen. This allows for more precise pointing since your fingers won’t cover what you are pointing to onscreen.
Source: zdnet.com (many photos)

As cool as the lucid screen is, this beats is hands down… no pun intended

Long time ago I was a big fan of Ultimate Tag Warrior wordpress plugin for tagging my posts. I loved that plugin. It was definitely in my top 3. Now that Wordpress has incorporated tagging (term taxonomy), UTW has all but disappeared. I think it is still around, but last time I looked for it, I could not find a version for Wordpress 2.3. Wordpress now has all the functions for terms and tags and you really don’t need UTW anymore.

The feature I really liked about it was the ability to do a yahoo keyword search based on the post content and then choose which keywords you want to use for tags.

I found a couple auto-taggers, but each of them included all the keywords from yahoo for your post. I would rather pick and choose the keywords for tags. So I wrote my own plugin.

Download the plugin here

It’s really simple. the button is added directly below the edit field for writing a post.

Once you are finished with your blog post, and before you publish it, just click the button and it will return all the keywords for the post. Then click on the tag and it automatically gets added to your the tags input.

Please note:
The hosted by godaddy checkbox is important. If your website is hosted with godaddy.com, you have to check that box to get results. This is because godaddy.com make you go through proxy servers to fetch remote content using CURL.

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        $curl = curl_init(); curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url );
 
curl_setopt($curl,CURLOPT_VERBOSE,1);
 
if(get_option('godaddy_host'))
 
{
 
curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_PROXYTYPE, CURLPROXY_HTTP);
 
//"http://64.202.165.130:3128"
 
curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_PROXY,"http://proxy.shr.secureserver.net:3128");
 
}
 
curl_setopt($curl,CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER,false);
 
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1 );
 
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 30 );
 
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT,500 );
 
curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "appid=testingyahoo&output=php&context=".$_POST['context']);
 
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_POST, 1 );
 
$res = curl_exec( $curl );
 
curl_close( $curl );

More information on the api for Yahoo context search

Update: 3-10-08
Fixed permission denied error on the ajax call.

This is the year I upgrade my Treo 650. I know that probably got a few chuckles as the Treo has moved from the most popular smartphone on the market to the “I can’t believe you still use that brick”. Well, just to let you know I’m not impressed with people totally consumed with their cellphones. I consider them electronic leashes and make us work many more hours then we really need to. I personally, want to use less technology when I’m out of the office, not just work more on a smaller (third screen). With that being said, I’m really excited about the new crop of smartphones coming out. In particular the Sony Ericsson EXPERIA X1, another EXPERIA Website (Flashed, good images).

This is a professional phone running microsoft mobile, and will be released on the T-mobile network. My Verizon account should be up by the time they release it so I will definitely jump over…If Verizon (Voyager) or Att (iPhone) doesn’t have some better products.

The hardware is also very compelling with a keyboard that felt great when I ran my fingers across it since it felt like metal and each key had a bit of an angle on it so it was quite tactile. There is also a large space bar and the keys are well-spaced for text input. There is a 3.2 megapixel camera and I am hoping this will take decent photos, unlike other WM devices. There is something over 400MB of flash ROM available to the end user our of the box and you can use microSD expansion cards too. It runs on a 500 Mhz processor and has a beautiful 3 inch WVGaA 800×480 display. WiFi and Bluetooth are included, as well as an FM radio and GPS receiver.
Source: [ZDNET] MWC08: The XPERIA X1 is one slick Windows Mobile device!

Can’t wait to see one in person. I really hope the metal finish and 3.2 megapixel camera are as good as they sound.