Google TiSP Going with the Flow Free Broadband

By Dave Smith Saturday March 31, 2007

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That’s right you heard it here first of April 2007 Google releases Free Google TiSP Broadband. What an amazing application of modern commodel communication.

Google Tisp Free Broadband

What a fanastic idea. I signed up for my kit just now. I can hardly wait to get rid of this old cable modem wireless router technology. I’m going all the way with the Royal Flush Service. Google TiSP FAQ

Again here is the link to get started and sign up for your free kit: Google TiSP Free Broadband And don’t forget to read the FAQ

Publish, Take it back, So You think

By Dave Smith Monday March 26, 2007

I was testing the CMA plugin from Realivent last week. I put a page up on the Tucson Real Estate in The News with the CMA plugin on it. The page was supposed to have an introductory paragraph about the CMA, but when I published the page it wasn’t there.

I didn’t have time to look at the code and fix the issue, so I simply set the page back to draft so it wouldn’t show up on the blog. I figured I’d get around to fixing the plugin this past week. I didn’t.

I like Realivent plugins, but I have one complaint. I wish they would make their code W3C compliant. From what I’ve found and fixed on my site it isn’t hard, just old style coding like:

$message = 'Request for a CMA'; $message .= ' Full Name: ' . $name; $message .= ' Email: ' . $email; $message .= ' Daytime Phone: ' . $phone_day; $message .= ' Evening Phone: ' . $phone_night;

Here is the point. I was on the blog and did a search for CMA to find out where it was mentioned and up popped the CMA Page, that is currently in “Draft” mode.

It appears if you once publish, even if you have set it back to draft, it can be searched and viewed on your blog.

Brother MFC-5460CN Much Less Than a Printer

By Dave Smith Sunday March 25, 2007

Follow the Logic Brick Road

I’ve never been the kind of person to use a knife for a screwdriver, well maybe a couple of times. But that’s not the point.

While the ladies of the house might go to the mall to “Shop” they wonder why I don’t want to come along. You know, walking from store to store watching them try on an assortment of clothes.

Why I’ve even got a seat in American Eagle Outfitters with my name on it. I watched my first ever music video in American Eagle. I saw some guy injecting a carrot with his DNA and the Carrot began to look and sing like him. That was my last music video as well.

Then when the day is done, they haven’t bought a single thing. Or if they do, I can almost be 90% certain they will take it back before the week is over. For some reason they look different at home than they do in the store. Go figure.

Ok, I digress, I would love to take the girls for an afternoon at Ace Hardware and Home Depot. I’ve had them there on a couple of occasions to pick up things for the house and they get the same look on their faces I get when we are at the mall. Can you imagine a whole afternoon going from the tool section, to the screw isle, then the plumbing pipe area, you can make a lot of cool stuff out of PVC pipe and fittings.

Yes, I know, what has this got to do with the Printer. I’m almost there.

Scan To Email

Last year our office got a new copy machine, I don’t mean our home office I mean the one we visit once a week to water the plant on our desk. The copier had a new function. We could scan a contract, enter our email address and a PDF of the contract would be sent to our email. Agents fell in love with this feature almost immediately.

However, you have to use a pencil eraser to enter the email address since the onscreen keyboard is so small only ladies with pointed fingernails can enter an email address. We “Big Fingered Guys”(BFG’s) have to use the eraser.

Several times over the past year I’ve made the trip down to the office, scanned the document, entered my email address, drove back to the house, and found it wasn’t here. So I get to go back to the office and do it again.

Everytime I have made that trip I’d say to myself, I’m going to be able to do this at home very soon.

We have an all in one HP machine someone threw away because it quit printing. I dug it out of the garbage, found drivers for it on line, and have used it for our scanner. It works fine for one or two page documents.

Like:

Estimates
BINSR’s
Addendum’s
Counter Offers

But for Contracts or The Seller Property Disclosure Statement, it is down to the office.

I found a printer driver called PrimoPFD, it lets me save scanned documents as PDF’s by selecting PrimoPDF as the printer. (It’s free) you’re beginning to see a theme here aren’t you.

I Hate Ink Jets

Yeah, now you know something personal.

I hate them because:

They clog up
They leak
They are messy
They run on the page when wet
(yes we do get some rain in Tucson)
They run out at the worst time
They require a lot of maintenance
clean the head, clean the head, clean the head

I’ve had all kinds, my favorite is the Epson 880 sitting in the other room, but even that one I hate. I’ve had Canon, HP, Brother, Oki, pretty much you name it at some time I’ve had one of their ink jets.

I’m a laser kind of guy. I have three of them,

2 Oki C5200 Color Lasers
1 Brother HL-2040 for pure black and white.

The Hunt for the Scanner

For months I’ve looked for a scanner that would auto document feed up to 35 pages and save as a PDF. All I found were flatbeds, with Document feeders you could buy as an accessory. All of them were way more than $100.

Last week Office Max ran in their Sunday add the Brother MFC-5460CN all in one wonder machine marked down from $140 to $99. I didn’t need a fax. I didn’t need another ink jet printer. I didn’t need an ink jet copier. I did need a scanner with a 35 page document feeder built in.

Some would think it is crazy to buy a four in one and only use the one, but I figure if it cost more to buy just a scanner, then DUH!!

I brought it home and you should have seen the look on the girls faces when I walked in with it. They looked at me, then at each other and the “What the heck is he up to” look appeared on their faces. They think I’m a gadget freak, or at least a printer, camera fetish kind of guy, sorry I digress again.

I took it out of the box very carefully, after all if this thing doesn’t do what I want it to do, back in the box it goes.

I installed the drivers,
the software package,
plugged it in,
plugged in the USB cable.

Up popped the command center and a reminder that all the ink cartridges were empty. I’m not installing those things, I don’t need ink for a scanner.

BTW, the stupid machine won’t even turn off if I don’t put ink in it. I hate machines that think they are smarter than I am. Ha! Stupid machine beep all you want when I hit the power switch, I can still pull the plug. It is sitting on the floor right now scrolling the message, “No Cartridge… Open the cover…Install ink Cartridge…”

The command center pops up and I see Scan and Custom Scan configurations along with other stuff I don’t need, at least I don’t need them right now.

I set it up as you can see with two b/w and two color scan settings.

Check out this configure panel.

I set the file type to PDF

Destination Folder

Save As Window ON so I can name the document and change the folder if I want.

Set the resolution

Scan Type to True Gray

I put 10 random pages in the document feeder.

Clicked on “Average Scan BW”

And in less than one minute I had a PDF file named as I wanted it in my folder of choice.

I DIDN’T HAVE TO DRIVE TO THE OFFICE.

You can scan images of course if you want to. You can even scan to email. It names the document and saves it as an attachment on a new email message. But for me all I need is to feed in those Contracts and SPDS and get a beautiful PDF file in my folder of choice.

For those documents that are faxed from inferior machines, I hate bad fax copy, especially the ones with a line down the page. I can set the scanner to 300 X 300 or even 1200 X 1200 to get a better copy of the bad fax.

I’m in love with this thing. OK, maybe I am a hardware freak. I’ll probably go ahead and feed the baby her ink cartridges before I put her to bed for the night.

I wonder if it will quit blinking if I only put one cartridge in. . . hum. . .

Single Property Site – Sidebar Widget

By Dave Smith Sunday March 25, 2007

The Sidebar Widget is essential for quicklysetting up my property sites. This means that I usually pick themes that are already widgetized. Once you activate the plugin go to the presentation tab. There you will see the Sidebar Widget listed.

I like having three column layouts for single property sites. I’ll go into the why in the theme’s post.

I also like to have a couple of text boxes so the first thing you will want to do after activating this plugin is to add at least an additional text box and save. You do this at the bottom of the setup screen

The layout of the sidebars is as follows.

Text1
This is where I put the brokerage and contact information
Text2
You can see above is the Summary Description of the property
Links
This is where the categories and links to them show up
- Documents
- Information
- Websites
Pages (I change this title to Detailed Information)
Recent Posts (I change the title to Additional Information)
This requires editing the sidebar widget file finding the word Recent Posts and changing it to read “Additional Information”

function widget_recent_entries($args) { extract($args); $title = __('Additional Information', 'widgets'); $r = new WP_Query('showposts=10'); if ($r->have_posts()) : ?>

This isn’t as hard as it may sound, you can copy all the text to notepad search for “Recent Posts” replace it with “Additional Information” copy all the text back to the plugin editor and save.

Or you can do it the way I do. Look at the code line for line till you find Recent Posts and replace it.

However, I only did this once. After that I saved this altered copy of the widget plugin for the single property listing blogs.

If you want to see how this works here is our example blog from the beginning.

Macenroe Single Property Site

There are a lot of, I’ll call them “sub-widgets” you can add to a blog if you have the sidebar widget installed on a blog. I keep it to the ones mentioned above.

The Sidebars are to:

make navigation of the site easy
provide quick summary details of the property
allow visitors to grasp a lot of information in a couple of quick glances

The Sidebar isn’t to steal the show. Keep it simple.

Single Property Sites – Pages and Posts

By Dave Smith Tuesday March 20, 2007

“Remember that every agent’s livelihood and ultimate goal is to have as many signs in the ground and as much advertising as possible. The signs and advertising bring more listing leads and buyer leads, which puts more money in the agent’s pocket.” Taken from Real/diablog – tomorrows real estate trends the post titled: ”Agents “Buying Listings” – How Much Does It Truly Hurt The Consumer And Real Estate Industry?”

A single property site is of no value if it can’t be found.

Post and Pages play an important part in creating and getting our site found in the search engines. I’ll outline the difference of each and the importance of each in this post.

I’ll cover the sidebar widget, links to documents, tags, odds and ends, pick a theme. But this is the post that tells you how to bring Single Property Sites to Life so the search engines bring buyers to your site.

Pages

Front Page is where I put the static information. It is an introduction to the site. The property street address is the page title (DO NOT include the City, State, Zip). This page is set as static in Wordpress. How

Options
Reading
Select the Page or Post to be on Top

Property Video Page I put the video on a page because I haven’t found a single video format that will validate. By putting this on a page you isolate it from the rest of the site.

When you hold a traditional open house you set out your open house signs at the major intersections which will provide you with the most traffic.

When holding a 24/7 open house you want to do the same thing.

Posts are Open House signs on the web.

What are the major intersections near the property.

Is there a national park
a historical market
a national attraction
an event held near this home
are there activities for a family
major shopping centers

Identify these locations then set out your signs at each one.

How do you do this?

Write the first post about the property Title address with City St Zip.
Write a separate post about each one on the listing blog site.
Put a map post showing where the home is located along with the location of each.
Each post should contain the event or location in the title.
After each post is published send out pings.

It won’t take long for your signs placed at each of these major intersections to begin to show up.

Someone searches for the local mall and up pops one of your signs. They search for the location of the golf tournament they want to attend and find one of your signs. They start thinking, it would be nice to have a home near there.

The Secret Sauce

Ok everyone, here is what you have been reading all these post for.
Here is what sets apart a Single Property Site that get found by the search engines and the ones that are created to impress the sellers.

ITS THE POSTS

I have created more than a dozen single property sites. But about three of those sites sold before I got the site posts created. They had pages, the blogs were active and pinged. But they were completely invisible on the search engines.

I never see any of the sites in the search engines, even if they are live for two or three weeks without posts. But as soon as I add posts the site suddenly is found everywhere.