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Death By Random Blogging

jason — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 03:08:07 +0000

Hats off to the non-professional bloggers out there that keep their blogs fresh and alive! For me, it’s yet another day night to resuscitate this blog with some of the hidden gems in my dusty drafts trove. But I won’t venture there quite yet. For this post, the question to answer is, "What have I been up to?"

Let’s see…

Coding WordPress and WordPress, and using WordPress
Silverlight, C#, and .NET experimentation
Map mashing and AJAXifying
Prettying people up and just making them look good (Photoshopping and Marketing)
Wondering if I’ll ever be able to backup 20GB worth of data online, and
Entertaining some new business partnerships
Lots of fun traveling

Stay tuned for more!

Voluntary Hiatus

jason — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 22:29:00 +0000

Thanks all for the emails of support while I was away. So what’s happened the last few months? Let’s see…

Adobe’s Creative Suite 3 released
Sellsius Launched
Active Rain membership grows to over 23,000 members
Localismis in beta
Jim Kimmons is now the Real Estate Business Guide
Mozy can backup Macs

I know a lot more has happened! Let me know what you think is worth noting.

DOCTYPE: The site killer.

jason — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 02:28:00 +0000

Did you know that bad DOCTYPEs are killing good websites. Use the right DOCTYPE to fix your site.

Nowadays, just about everyone knows something about HTML–especially my wife’s cousin’s uncle’s third son, a.k.a. Little Johnny. But do you know about one of the most common HTML errors? It’s an improperly written DOCTYPE tag.

Jeffrey Zeldman has a short article that will help you to Fix Your Site With the Right DOCTYPE!

CSS Overboard

jason — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 23:28:00 +0000

It’s been said many times that CSS is great for markup (vs. layout). This brings up a good point about going overboard with CSS. And I’ve done it many times…

You have a certain design in your head and start applying new divs, spans, and class to fit that look. Although CSS is capable of doing lots of neat stuff, adding new tags or classes can quickly nullify the efficiencies of CSS.

Minimize the number of custom classes by sticking with standard HTML tags. It’s not only good practice, but you also can quickly stay compatible with screen readers and cell phones. You will also provide nice structured content for SEO and non-CSS capable browsers.

What’s Labor Day

jason — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 00:17:00 +0000

This past weekend, Labor Day weekend, is one of the most popular camping weekends in the U.S. It’s also one of the weekends that most REALTORS^® are unreachable (yet Home Depot remains open… I know because I was there!). But what is Labor Day?

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, it’s a holiday for workers. Labor Day began as a way to pay tribute to the workers of America. And apparently, it’s the only holiday that is not devoted to any person, religion, or people group.

If you think I’m making this stuff up, be sure to visit my Labor Day source.

Redirect your broken feeds

jason — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 05:42:00 +0000

Okay, it’s my fault. I broke it. As I tested my Talkr podcast, I broke my Feedburner feeds. So sorry to all you RSS feeders.

What happened?

All my feeds are forwarded to FeedBurner. This allows me to better manage my feed statistics as well as offload the [minimal] feed bandwidth. When I Talkr-enabled my site, I setup Talkr so that it pointed to my local feed. As you guessed, my site redirected Talkr to my FeedBurner feed. Now here’s the kicker, I setup FeedBurner to read my Talkr feed. This was so it would pickup the generated audio. Big mistake.

Are you thoroughly confused? Here’s a visual:

My site redirects to FeedBurner. Talkr feeds FeedBurner. FeedBurner feeds Talkr. It’s an endless loop. So the feeds were never updated.

How’d I fix it?

I created a special feed just for Talkr. If you really want to know the technical, I created a new RewriteRule in my .htaccess file. This feed will not get redirected and it allows Talkr to retrieve any new updates. So no more crazy redirects.

Thanks for your patience!

Coolest Websites

jason — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 23:46:00 +0000

Within real estate, or any business for that matter, website functionality matters. Businesses are always riding the cutting edge of web technologies, hopefully gaining the largets market share. Well, if you want to know what’s really cool, check out TIME’s 50 Coolest Websites. It’s a conglomeration of cool websites, most of which are decked out in shiny Web 2.0 garb.
Here are few that might inspire those with real estate websites.

Podcast Pickle – Podcast Directory
Jumpcut – Online Video Production
ClipShack – Online Video Storage
Yelp – Local Business Reviews
Argali – White and Yellow Pages
Blurb – Blog Publisher (Publish your blog as a book)
Kayak – Trip Planner
Google Spreadsheets – Online Spreadsheets
Writely – Collaborative Word PrRocessor
Dodgeball – Meeting (Party) Planner
Meebo – Unified Messaging

There were many more, that had some great function (But I didn’t see how to immediately relate them to real estate):

SingShot – Online karaoke
Drawn – Collaborative drawing blog
Pandora – Custom radio stations
Mighty Goods – Cool stuff to buy
More… – Time wasters section