Real Estate Blog Lab

I know a lot of RE bloggers are using Diverse Solutions for their IDX provider.  We use DS on our Tucson site and love it.  Our biggest problem is keeping the number of registrations under 1000.  As an aside I wish DS would provide a better registered user management interface.  Now let’s look at the DS Mobile Script Option

DS Mobile Script

Diverse Solutions has been rolling out a mobile script that you can install on your site to take your visitors to your search page directly to your DS mobile search page that you can configure from the DS  Control panel.  I love it.  Gives you total control over the mobile visitor and you can setup custom pages for them to see and a custom search for them to view etc.

Be careful how you install it.  The instructions on the control panel say to paste the code in the header of your site before the </head> tag.

What they don’t tell you is if you do that for the main site header.php it will take every visitor to your site no matter what page they are trying to access from their mobile device to your DS Mobile page.  EVERY SINGLE MOBILE VISITOR TO THE DS MOBILE PAGE.

Why?  because you put the script in your header.php file which is the beginning of ALL your pages not just your search page.

The Solution to installing DS Mobile on a WordPress Blog

The solution isn’t very hard if you know a little code and have FTP access to your site.

You have to create a custom page and header template for your DS Search page.

Here is a quick way to do that (I’m using the TwentyTen theme in this example).

1. Copy the header.php and page.php file from your theme directory to your computer.
2. rename the header file to be header-search.php
3. copy the DS Mobile script into that header-search.php
4. rename the page.php to search-page.php
5. Add the page template tag to the top of the search-page.php file
6. Change the call to the header to be the header search.php
7. Upload them to your theme folder
8. Open your Search page in the editor and use the new search page template

Sample Page Template code

/**
* Template Name: One column, no sidebar
*
* A custom page template without sidebar.
*
* The “Template Name:” bit above allows this to be selectable
* from a dropdown menu on the edit page screen.
*
* @package WordPress
* @subpackage Twenty_Ten
* @since Twenty Ten 1.0
*/

This is the one from the TwentyTen one column template   change the template name to Search Page

Change the header file call in the Search Page template

Close to the top of the page you will see:

get_header(); ?>

Change this to

get_header(search); ?>

Once these steps are done your visitors will only go to the DS mobile page for the search page and not every page or post on your site.

As with all site modifications, once you have completed these steps, test it by using your mobile device to access your site.

Don’t forget to configure the mobile page on your DS control panel, don’t just copy the script to your site.  Scroll down on that page and fill in the information you want to convey to your mobile search visitors.

I’ve now updated the big guns in my arsenal of WordPress sites.  The only one that had any difficulty at all was the Lab.  I had a custom menu disappear from the menu editor.  It still existed, and worked on site, but I couldn’t view or edit the menu.

It was simple, I rebuilt the menu in about 5 minutes and activated it for the sub-nav below the header image.  This experience caused a few hours of research on how to backup just the custom menus.  Not much out there on them.  A great plugin would be the ability to export and import custom menus.

I found one small post mentioning a conflict with All-In-One-SEO with custom menus causing them to disappear on update.  But I couldn’t verify this and I updated a few small sites with it still activated and had no difficulty.

The big guns have several custom menus and up to 70 pages in each.  I didn’t want to rebuild those menus.  Therefore here is what I did:

1. Backed up the entire database using SQLAdmin Export function.  I did the entire database and just the options table (that’s where the menus reside).
2. I updated all plugins
3. Updated the theme files
4. Deactivated all plugins
5. Ran the upgrade
6. Reactivated all plugins

Everything went of without a hitch.  All menus are there and functioning.

Take the recommended precautions (and don’t shortcut the process this time by leaving the plugins activated) and everything should upgrade without a hitch

When you reactivate the plugins, make sure you check your site.  If it doesn’t look right, deactivate the plugins again and start adding them back one at a time.

Mailto @: = “SPAM IN MY INBOX”

You want people to contact you don’t you?  Well of course you do.  You want to plaster your email address all over your site in hope they will contact you “For All Their Real Estate Needs”. (Yes, that’s sarcasm).

But you want to make it easy for them so you make your email address click-able.  So you or your “Webguy” use the HTML command mailto: to make the link click-able.

However, there are two things you should be aware of before you do this:

Spam bots crawl sites looking to harvest email addresses

They look for “mailto:” and harvest email addresses so they can begin sending you offers by the thousands to enhance certain body parts.  Sell you drugs from Canada or invite you to “personal webcam chats” in Russia.

This is one of the reason we have contact forms that never display an email address, the contact come to you and you can respond accordingly.

Annoying as HELL

Well, it’s  not as bad as HELL but it really is annoying when a website opens my email client so I can send them an email message.  If you happen to be on a computer that isn’t yours and suddenly the email client is opened and you are viewing someone’s email messages. Even worse is when they don’t tell you the link is not to a site but instead mailto

With all that said, I still have clients that want those email addresses displayed and click-able.  Now there’s a nifty (yes, I said nifty) plugin that will encode the email address so Spam bots can’t read it and send you all those desirable offers.

Email Address Encoder

This plugin (Click Add New under plugins and search Email Address Encoder) is simple to use.

1. Install the plugin
2. Activate the plugin

That’s it, no settings or configuration.

Enter an email address in a page or post and then look at the page source.  You won’t find mailto: or the email address, instead just a lot of sweet gibberish.

Now it doesn’t solve the Annoying issue  (I really try to NOT piss off annoy my site visitors).  But if you are still stuck in the 70′s & 80′s way of embedding your email address believing this is “The Way” to effective lead capture . . .