Real Estate Blog Lab

Feeding Your Inner Geek while Feeding the Family

By Dave Smith Wednesday March 17, 2010

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But I want to do the fun stuff. . . I overheard this, no I didn’t over hear it, actually it was in a conversation yesterday with a colleague getting in touch with her inner geek. We’ve been working together on a couple of projects. Honestly, the geeky stuff is the fun stuff. I know when I see a person who hasn’t really discovered their inner geek yet.

How to Spot The Inner Geek

This isn’t as hard as it might seem. There are a couple of easy tests.

While in a conversation say:

“I was able to make the entire site change by tweaking the style.css file. By adding a couple of div tags, formatting the #sidebar h2 tags with a couple adjustments to the list-style-type tags and it changed dramatically”

Once said, look in their eyes, if they are glazed over like a deer in the headlights, “No Inner Geek”. If they perk up and have a gleam in their eye, but look a bit puzzled, there is a spark of inner geek waiting to be feed. If they ask an intelligent question, Okay, if they ask any question, they are on their way to discovering their inner geek.

Once The Inner Geek is Discovered Now What

Here is where the rubber meets the road, or the addiction takes hold. If you let the inner geek out, and especially if it takes control, well . . .

I’ve know a few bloggers who have lost control of their inner geek. (‘ll confess, it happens to me from time to time) they too are easy to spot. How?

Their blog theme’s are always changing, but they haven’t written a post in weeks. They spend all their blogging time feeding the inner geek. “I can move those sidebar headlines to the right a few pixels and they will line up better”. “The sidebar needs to be a little closer to the content area” . “I want the blog name to be higher and bolder in the header”. “What if all the links were red once visited, but blue if they haven’t been clicked on?”

See what I mean? So much time is spent geeking on the blog that no content gets written. So one day the guilt ferry comes (yeah, it is a ferry, not a fairy) because that boat rolls into your business harbor and you suddenly realize it has been weeks since you wrote a new blog post.

You want to, but the words don’t come, You really need to get your brokerage logo in the sidebar and update your contact information. The call to action buttons are only an idea, and you really know you should have those on the blog. Should I write a post? about what? or open photoshop elements and make some cool call to action buttons?

Tweaking your blog won’t increase your google traffic. All the SEO in the world won’t matter if you only have 30 posts on your blog.

“Really?” Yes, really, I know, inner geek bubble burst. SEO is important, but it is like teaching your two year old how to shave. No need. You have to have something to SEO.

No matter how pretty you make your blog look, no matter how quickly the page load time, it won’t feed your family. It won’t bring business in the door.

Oh, Geez, you mean I have to write, YIKES! I was afraid this would happen some day. But you don’t have to write the great American novel.

Embrace your Inner Geek, but don’t let it ruin your life and business.

Post Tags: embrace your inner geek , inner geek

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Search and Replace a Time Saver

By Dave Smith Friday March 12, 2010

3 Comments

This little plugin is always in my toolbox of “I don’t want to live without this” plugin. I don’t use it often but when I do it is a dragon slayer. Let me give you a couple of examples where this little tool shines and shows it’s stuff. Search and Replace.

Domain Name Changes and Site Migration

You are moving your blog from one domain to another. Not too hard, right? You do the backups the re-installs of the files, restore the database, change the domain name in the general settings and up pops the blog. Cool. Everything look like it is good and you take down the old site. Suddenly all the images disappear from your posts. Why? Because the image url’s were still pointed to the old domain name. They worked fine linking back to their original location till you took down the site. What do you do?

Did you move the image files to the new site? (Probably, let’s hope so) You thought they were the ones being pulled into the new location. But when you open a post in the editor, there is the link back to the old domain wp-content/upload etc. Now the light comes on. “Holy Kow, I have to change all the image links in all the posts to point to the new domain.

Senario 2

You built a new site “Off site” for a client. Once they are happy with the way it looks you move all the files to their hosting, point the blog to their domain name and . . . Same as above. All the image links in the post/pages are back to your Development site. What do you do now?

The answer is the same. Use the plugin search and replace. It will go through the database searching for the string to the old domain and replacing it with the new domain. The plugin has the option to only search and replace in certain areas of the database. Only need something in a post or page replaced? check “content”.

For example: You need to replace www.myolddomain.com with www.mynewdomain.com. Go to the search and replace settings page. Select “Content” then enter www.myolddomain.com in the search field and www.mynewdomain.com in the replace field. Click “GO” and in about 1/10th of a second it is done.

Note: Make a backup of your database before using search and replace.

Removing Word Inserted Formatting

This past week I had a friend who set up a new site for a client. The client had been writing all the content for the site in Word. When the project was ready for content the client did a copy and paste move of all the content to the new pages for the site.

The content was all there, but the site was supposed to be justified so all the margins lined up right and left. That’s how the Style.css was setup for the site. The pages however were ragged right. What happened? Looking at the HTML editor revealed that every single paragraph for all the pages and post started with <p style text-align=”left”> That line of html overrode the style.css. My friend thought it was going to take going through the posts one at a time and removing the formatting code from each paragraph.

Enter search and replace. Search: <p style text-align=”left”> Replace: <p> . Five seconds later the entire site was “justified” and hours of tedious hand editing was avoided.

Put this Tool Away

Don’t leave this tool laying around. Meaning, either don’t let anyone using the site know it exists, or better yet, when you are done using it, “DELETE IT” from the site.

Why? because this can be a very dangerous tool. If you are not careful you can end up changing text strings that you don’t want changed.

In the example above on domain name change. If you have a post that references your old domain name and you spell it out www.yourolddomain.com; when the search and replace runs it will replace that string with the new one. Therefore, you think carefully about the string you want to search and replace. In this example you could go further by searching for www.yourolddomain.com/wp-content/uploads/ and replace it with www.yournewdomain.com/wp-content/uploads/ This would prevent you changing any reference to just the old domain itself.

If someone sees this plugin and decides to use it for a quick way to change references or fix typo’s in a post, they could end up taking down the entire blog.

That is why it is good to only have it available on sites where no one can “stumbleupon” the plugin settings and try and use it. I treat it like a powertool. It works great, gets the job done fast, but shouldn’t be left where the “kids” might find it.

Post Tags: search and replace plugin