Real Estate Blog Lab

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The boys at Sellsius have surfaced and they have done so with a bang in the blogosphere. Introducing some of us to Animoto. Animoto is a blast.

Here is a quick short that took just a few minutes to put together.

Limit your images to 15 and select the 30 sec free option to play around with it.

If you are using Wordpress editor you will need to work in Code view turning off the visual editor as it thinks it is smarter than you are and strips off needed code.

It will display properly the first time, but after that forget it. If you want to work in the visual editor I recommend paste in the code just before you publish. If you want to preview the post with placement then switch user settings to code view when you are done writing and formatting your post. Then paste in the code, preview and publish. (go to users, select your profile, uncheck use visual editor, save)

You will need to remember to make this switch to the code view editor if you want to make changes to the post in the future.

Unlimited length and images can be obtained with an annual subscription of $30.

The only limitation I can find that some will not like. Once you generate the video there is not going back to tweek it with the same effects. You can change the images, and the order of the images and the sound track, but when you click to generate the new video, it is random, you have not control.

Going back to add a forgotten image or taking one out that doesn’t look right will result in the making of a completely new video. If you can live with this limitation you might have a lot of fun with Animoto.

Glad to have Joe and Rudy back in the pool.

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Have you ever wanted a multi billion dollar company to get your information to the world in seconds and for the amazingly low price of FREE!

Last week I wrote the post Google Search Results faster than a Speeding Nanite The short of it, I was beginning to notice my blog posts were showing up in regular Google search results in minutes and not days like they used to. I’m not going into the process again here you can read the post.

Here is the point. I’ve been tracking this for all four of the main blogs I write. The results are conclusive. YES! This wonderful amazing company called Google is getting my blog posts to the world in minutes.

I’m in Love,
Oh yes in Love,

I don’t care if the Google Dance is a hard one.
I’m in Love, I’m in Love with you, My Google.

Google The object of my affection

Last night we drove up to Phoenix to pick up a car. It was 1 o’clock in the morning when we got home. I was tired for that matter everyone was tired. So it was a quick check of the sites to make sure all was well (they are like children you know). Next, check email then it was off to bed.

I was brushing my teeth when the lovely tired wife says;
“Oh, I need you to write a blog post about The Oro Valley Farmer’s Market Corn Festival tomorrow.”
I said, “OK, when is it?”
“Saturday.”
To which I said, “honey, tomorrow is Friday, you want me to write a blog post about an event that will be just one day away. We won’t have time for it to get out in the search engines in one day. I need a few more days, it is better if I have at least four days notice.”

“But Honey, (I hate it when she calls me ‘but honey’ : ) you told me you are having things show up in minutes on Google”

End of discussion. Alarm goes off a little after 6 am. Of to the office (on the other side of the house).

• Scan the little flyer taken from the refrigerator door.
• Clip the section on the corn festival
• Clean up image of corn on the cob
• Upload the images
• Write the post
• Publish
• Autopinger send ping

I hit the shower and when I come back into the office I do a blogsearch.google.com for Oro Valley Farmers Market Corn Festival. BAM! It says: Posted by Dave 22 minutes ago.

I search Google for the same phrase and Oro Valley Corn Festival.

YES, YES, YES, It is There. 22 minutes after I write and publish a post about the Oro Valley Corn Festival it is announced to the world.

At which point my beautiful wife makes her appearance in the office to find me with a Huge Grin on my face like I was seeing something I shouldn’t.

“What?”

“Go to Google and type in Oro Valley Corn Festival”

She does, and there is our blog post page 1, #1 in Google Search Results.

Am I the ONLY person in the entire blogosphere this is excited about this?

RE Bloggers do you understand the implication of this? Please, please, please say you do.

Google is publishing our Press Releases almost before we finish writing them.

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Do you check your posts when you published?

I have a routine when I publish a new post. Especially now that I’m tracking the test site Tucson AZ Real Estate. The routine is as follows:

• Publish the post
• Ping (now using autopinger, it pings Google)
• Wait 15 minutes
• Go to blogsearch.google.com and search the title tag
• If not found search related keywords

Sometimes it even takes a day before it will show up for some reason, but usually it is there in 15 minutes or less.

Then I start checking for the title in regular Google searches. It usually takes a day or two for them to show up in the regular Google search index.

Last night I published a post on Tucson Condo Market - Summer 2007 I switched tabs on the browser to key in a search for Tucson Condo Market summer 2007. I forgot to go to blogsearch google. Instead I was searching regular Google less than 20 minutes after the post was published. IT WAS THERE! I couldn’t believe my eyes at first. While I was going on about this to Barbara she searched just Tucson Condo Market and said “It is here too for just Tucson Condo Market. She wasn’t as impressed as I.

This is the kind of post that is time related since the results of a Google search are constantly changing. Here is the Google search for Tucson Condo Market. I have an older post on the Tucson Real Estate in The News blog that ranks high but the result right now for what we are looking at is Tucson AZ Real Estate. It isn’t the actual post being indexed but the main page with the latest post content. Later the post itself will index with it’s own title.

Is anyone else seeing anything like this happening to your blog posts?

Is Google Taking Blog Pings and adding them to their index?

I am guessing here, but I wonder if Google is taking the ping from blogs which usually turn up on blogsearch.google in minutes and quickly indexing those pings into their regular search results. Maybe it an experiment, maybe it was just lucky timing.

But what if it is the next wave. What if you can publish a post and have it found in Google search results in a matter of minutes not days? Can you see how this might influence your decisions about what to write and when. If you could say (Scoop) anyone in your market with information by posting on your blog and having it in Google right away?

This is my question. Is anyone seeing anything like this?

UPDATE: Less than 20 minutes after publishing this post, it was in the Regular Google Index. I know there are a lot of searches on Google Search Results but not with speeding nanite in the title. When it is unique like that I can find it faster.

UPDATE: UPDATE: The new post RE Photographers get The Digital Photography Book was indexed in blogsearch google in 6 minutes from publish. I also put a number of names in that post in bold. I searched those names and they also came up associated with this new post first.

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Update: As of Friday Noon July 27, 2007 it was working again.

Request Timeout

This request takes too long to process, it is timed out by the server. If it should not be timed out, please contact administrator of this web site to increase ‘Connection Timeout’.

You might want to try and send a manual ping for your site! I’m getting connection time out error meaning right now it doesn’t appear any pings are going through.

There is not contact form at Ping-O-matic so the next best thing is to blog about it and see if everyone is getting the same results. Ping-o-matic

I usually don’t rely on Wordpress to automatically send out pings whenever a post is published. I like to see it myself. Sometimes I get the Hold on Cowboy you just sent a Ping! and that is fine. I know it went. Sometimes I don’t.

I also check blogsearch.google.com to see if the post is there. Yesterday was a busy day, I didn’t do either. This morning I’m looking for one of the post on blogsearch.google and it isn’t anywhere to be found. I try to manually ping and I’m getting Connection Time Out Errors on all browsers.

Check it out and let me know if anyone else is getting the same message. If so, it would appear they have been down for at least 24 hrs. maybe longer and there are a lot of blogs out there sending pings, or at least they think they are.

I’ll be interested to see what results you are getting.

For now you can use AutoPinger

• Scroll down when you get there.
• I suggest you check let me fill in the title.
• Scroll down again, (on some browsers)
• Fill in your information
• Ping

Hope you all have a great pinging day. : )

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More than an experiment a passion.

The premise for the experiment

1. Setup a new domain name.
2. Use Wordpress as the basis
3. Posts & Pages
4. See how the search engines respond

The process that brought about this new venture is outlines in the posts I’ve written recently in this order:

1. Real Estate Weblogging 101
2. A Tucson Realtors Journey in Web Presence
3. Building a Real Estate Blog Site or Refurbish

This new blog about Tucson is constructed on the basis of the things I’ve learned since starting real estate blogging.

What’s in a name?

We are told to have a URL that is rich in keywords. I didn’t know that before. Actually the first time I read it I didn’t even know what that meant. Now I have a good keyword rich name www.tucsonazrealestateblog.com

If you are just starting out do your best to find a URL that is keyword rich for your area. Don’t be afraid of the word “blog” either. I know it has appeared on a couple of “poison word” lists, but lists change and so do uses of words. Some of the best placing blogs in search engines have “blog” right in the url. Google has even created an entire www.blogsearch.google.com just for searching blogs. Did you notice that Google has “blog” in that URL? For this experiment I have included the word blog in the URL.

Wordpress

I chose Wordpress for my platform. This isn’t to say that other platforms aren’t good. I simply have never used anything but Wordpress. The other day Jay Thompson call me the Wordpress Wizard. I’m still glowing from that one.

Pick a platform that fits your comfort level. I know the reason a lot of bloggers have made changes to their site has been the limitations and restrictions of the first platform they started to build their blog on. Ask other RE bloggers for suggestions and make sure you pick to fit your abilities.

Choosing a Theme?

This one is probably one of the most important choices you will make. Many chose a them because the like the way it looks. My grandfather used to say, “Most fishing lures are made to catch fishermen, not fish” It doesn’t matter how pretty the theme is if it isn’t designed to bring your content to the internet so it can be found it isn’t a good theme.

I’ve used and tweaked a lot of themes in the last year. I’ve finally found some that are pretty easy to change and get my content to the Internet quickly. I don’t know all that is involved in this. If I did I would share it. I do know I’ve picked a couple of themes for the single property sites and those sites were never found. After waiting a couple of months in one case I changed the theme and in two days it was placing #1 in Google for its location.

I won’t recommend any particular theme or themes in general here. The right theme in many cases depends on how much you are willing or able to make changes to the theme in the theme editor. If you are comfortable doing this there are some great themes I would recommend using and tweaking for your blog. If not there are others to pick from.

Anyone wanting help here please contact me. I’ll be glad to share what I can. (No I don’t charge for this) Wow, another good reason to be a RE Blogger, you meet the nicest people.

It also depends on how you want your content displayed. I like lots of picture and I like room to write without making a post look like it is a novel. This means I modify or pick themes that provide me at least 600 pixels of writing and display space.

I like three columns, but have learned to live with two. It is hard to get three columns and 600 px to write in and keep it on the screen.

The theme for this new blog has been modified significantly since I first downloaded it. I have used it on several of the property blogs. It is great and gets the placement I want quickly on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Post and Pages

I’m going to incorporate more pages on this blog than any I’ve created before. There is some content I don’t want moving down, and into achieves. I want it there all the time so I’ll have a pages index of content (I don’t know how I’m going to do this yet) for information I want to convey and make available not in posts.

Search Engine Placement

I’m going to expand on this in a separate post. Here is a little to chew on for now and a hint at how you can help your blog.

Everyone wants their blog to be found. We are told “Don’t write for the search engines, write for your readers” I agree completely with this statement.

Here is the issue.
If I can’t get my posts found on the Internet, how am I going to get readers?

Second, Once I get my content on the search engines how can I keep it there?

Remember this is just an introduction to these questions. Here is a quick answer to number 2 that will help RE Bloggers keep their content from falling into supplemental results or disappearing all together.

1. Leave Comments on other RE Bloggers posts.
   I’ve noticed the post that continue to be indexed month after month are the posts with comments on them.
2. Write posts with quality content oriented links in the post to other blog post both on your blog and on other blogs. (Yes, this is called link love; spread it around it will do you good)
3. Allow a do-follow on comments. I moderate all comments on all the blogs because even with askimet and a couple of spam filters some thing will still slip through with words and links I don’t even want to read. This means only comments get on the blog I want there and so I use a plugin called do-follow that takes the no-follow tag off that Wordpress automatically turns on for comment URL’s

This means if you leave a comment on any post on any of the blogs I author, and you put in your URL, you get a link back from that comment to your site.

I recommend other bloggers taking this same approach and help other bloggers keep their content indexed and allow do-follows on their comments so they are receiving quality links back to their blog site.

This is the part of the experiment where I need the help of others in the RE Blogosphere.

• I’ll provide posts and content on the Tucson AZ Real Estate blog that you will want to read and enjoy reading.
• There should be ideas there other bloggers can use as seeds for their own posts.
• I’ve already installed the do-follow plugin on this blog so if you leave a comment you get link back to your blog.
• I’ll keep sharing what I learn from this experiment right here in the lab so everyone benefits from what is learned along the way.
• I’ll keep posting here in the lab and providing links to your posts and blogs as they pertain to the post topic.

I’m asking for RE Bloggers to:

• Read the blog
• Comment when you want to, or need a back-link : )
• Put it on your blogroll because it is a good blog not just because I asked
• Let me know what you think of it either on site or here in the lab

I think this is going to be a great experiment and experience. I’m excited about putting it all together with

• A Clean New URL (just two weeks old)
• A new Theme
• A new approach to Posts and Pages
• Tightly focused, hyper-local content

Tucson AZ Real Estate I’m putting the link down here for those that don’t want to scroll back to the top. This should be fun and educational. If it helps any blogger new or experienced it will all be worth it.

Final note: In the recent post Real Estate Blogging Hot Topic of the Hour I talked about why you write. I said this blog is for RE Bloggers and it is. This new blog is for anyone interested in Tucson. It isn’t a sales blog, it isn’t a service blog, it isn’t to get clients. It is about the community in which we work and live. If you want to have a Great RE blog don’t sell it. Build it right and they will come. I can’t believe I said that. Thanks for your support.

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I know some Wordpress bloggers have had an issue with getting the Wordpress Spellchecker to work.I first encountered this gem when I upgraded to Wordpress 2.0 The only thing about it, it only worked in Firefox, not IE6. It would show the misspells, and show the list, but it wouldn’t replace the text. So I would write my posts and then close and go to FF and spell-check and publish.

I know you are saying why not just work in FF.  Go figure.  But that’s not the point.

When I upgraded this blog to 2.2 I got a full preview not a cramped pinched version that wasn’t wysiwyg.  But the spellchecker stopped working all together.  All I got was an error message about ajax.

You can see that on the Wordpress 2.2 upgrade post .  I finally found a post by a young man with way too much time on his hands that posted on Wordpress that if you took the spell-check directory from an older version and replaced it with the current directory it would work.

I went back to my 2.1.3 version of wordpress and drilled down to this directory.  Copied it and now the spellchecker works with IE and FF.  It is great.  When I upgraded to version 2.2.1  I intentionally overwrote the directory to see if this had been corrected.  It wasn’t.

I copied the directory again, and once again I’m in business.

Here is the path to the directory to replace if you are having this issue.

• wp-include
• js
• tinymce
• plugins
• spellchecker

Replace the entire spellchecker directory and your spellchecker should work.

The Rich Text Editor

I know a lot of bloggers that hate the wordpress text/post editor and use other software to create their posts.  I’ve struggled with it since I started blogging and have learned to live with its little land mines. 

When version 2.2 came along and I had the preview turn into a full size screen with a link at the top of the editor I really fell in love with the wysiwyg editing of my posts.  I can move text to just where I want it around images and format for readability.

Now that I have the spellchecker working, it is a lot more fun to create posts and get them ready for publication.  I run the spellchecker then I hit the preview button and read it as it will appear on the page.  There I catch the phrases and typos that are words but wrong.

Once I like the look of it.  I publish.

It still cracks me up that it identifies blog, blogger, etc. as a misspelled word.  Someone should fix this.

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I’ll admit it. I have a bad case of Photo envy. I try not to give into it, but even at night while I sleep, it is in my dreams, haunting me, taunting me with it colors, prospective, and composition. I don’t even need a computer to see it, This image is etched in my mind. I just can’t seem to help it. I haven’t sought professional help, yet. 

I already know the what is causing it. More precisely I should say the who is causing it. She is T without the “h”.  I’m drawn daily to see what new time and place has been captured;  frozen by lens and chip.  Composed by this phototog that is as snap happy a person I have ever encountered.

Back to the Image

 Look at it.  It should be on a calendar or the cover of an architectural digest.

A St Paul Treasure is what she called this one. There were others before and I’m sure there will be more to come.  It is the nature of the thing I suppose.

I want to take pictures like this.  I have 4 working digital cameras, one is even a new Nikon D40.  None of my images look this rich.  I have image editing software some that will even edit the raw files from the camera.

I found out from Teresa that she uses Photoshop Elements to touch up her photos.  That same day I went out and bought Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 bundled with Adobe Premier Elements 3.0.  I read the manuals, yes, you heard me I READ THE MANUALS! still my images pale compared to hers.

Then I realized, it isn’t the cameras or the software.  It’s the subject matter itself.  Here in the Southwest Desert everything is dirt or made to look like dirt.

• The houses are made with stucco painted to look like dirt.
• Slump block are made of dirt
• Adobe and Burnt adobe are made of dirt
• Saltillo tile are made from clay, a form of dirt
• Even the air is often filled with dirt making it hard to get  a really good view of the mountains

So it turns out I’m taking pictures of dirt, dirt, and more dirt, things made to look like dirt and all of it fades because of the intense Southwestern Sun. 

Sometimes I change the angle to get color of some kind, any kind except the look of pale faded colors and pale faded dirt. 

Take this one for example.  Nice color in that mesquite tree and the prefect time of year to get the new growth on the cactus with the slight purple tinge to it.

Many subdivisions have HOA color restrictions that make it so the only thing you are free to change is the color of toilet paper on the roll, but don’t let them know they overlooked this or that too could change.

I’m left to taking images of flowers, trees and as much blue sky as I can manage to put in a picture.  Close ups with limited viewable dirt.

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Early this morning, I took the Lab up to Wordpress 2.2. I did the 5 step process as recommended.

1. Backup all the files
2. Deactivate all the plug-ins
3. Install the new files overwriting the old ones
4. Run upgrade.php
5. Re-activate the plug-ins

I will say this upgrade has been the one causing the least issues of any major upgrade I’ve done. The last one was a disaster from the sense it changed all the permalinks and made the pages disappear from the search engines if not fixed quickly you would have bots crawling and not finding and then finding under a new name and address. This upgrade didn’t go there thankfully.

Gottcha’s so far

Widgets

This new version has built in support for widgets, so you won’t need to or be able to activate the sidebar widget. Don’t stress over it. When you go the presentation tab it now has the word widget for the link.

MyBlogLog Plug-in

If you have the mybloglog plugin installed, you will need to add it to the sidebar again even if it was there before, it is now down in the options to add section.

Remember you will have to modify the code or it will produce W3C errors. I think this is more a wordpress issue, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t fix the code every time you save the widget settings it reverts back and produces the errors.

Spell checker

The spell checker (at least for me) with both IE 6 and FF just hangs. Once I got a message about ajax something or other. I hope they fix this soon, I like the spell checker feature. You can recover from it by clicking on the save or save and continue you won’t loose anything, it is just scary seeing it hang up with a ghostly pale screen.

New Stuff So Far

Preview

The only new thing I’ve noticed besides the built in widget support and something called “lots of ajax” is the preview window is now full screen and the link is at the top of the edit window. You now get a full WYSIWYG preview which is nice for those wanting the format to be just right when published. No hanging words around images, etc.

The blog seems to load faster, but maybe that is just wishful thinking.

I’m sure there will be more things appear in the next couple of days. I’m going to go ahead and upgrade the Oro Valley Real Estate blog, but wait a little while longer on the Tucson Real Estate in The News.

If you run into anything that other might want to know, please leave a comment.

Running a Wordpress upgrade is always a hold your breath experience. Going to a new (dot) is even more so.

If you are just noticing your avatars are missing from your comments, it isn’t related to the upgrade. Read MyAvatars are Missing!

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Sometime on May 18th I noticed all the avatars for mybloglog suddenly disappeared from all my blogs comments.

Oh, My!!

I quickly changed from IE to FF and they were still missing. I changed to another computer, gone.

• I un-installed
• re-installed
• upgraded to 0.02a

Nothing, they are gone. I’ve left the plugin creator a message that the avatars have escaped. If anyone has seen them suddenly show up on your blog let us know.

Someone needs to get them rounded up and back on the blogs where they belong.

The links are still active and functioning in the comments but all you will see is this pathetic emptiness where avatars once ruled.

This is a 911 alert for the missing avatars.

As to my knowledge at this time there have been no ransom demands made.

Will Someone, Anyone Please return the missing Avatars!

This is a public blogging announcement.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled blog posts.

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Almost everyday I hit the links at the bottom of the dashboard page and check the new plugins and themes available for Wordpress.

On May 16 in the plugins post there was an archives plugin mentioned.

I had just been setting up a new theme one of our listings and found it had the ability to create a new page, select archive theme and publish. Up popped an archive page of all the pages and posts.

I thought that was great, and then running into the archive plugin for my exisiting sites was a must have.

I followed the link to the Clean Archive Plugin downloaded and installed it on this blog and the Tucson real estate blog.

It didn’t appear to function as it was supposed to, actually it didn’t function at all. The author Sean, I don’t know that he has a last name, made it easy to contact him by email on his Geek with Laptop blog.

I told him how I installed it and provided links and relevant information and moved on to another project.

In about two minutes the phone rang and it was Sean on the phone calling me about the issue. I’ll admit I was in total shock. We figures out I had downloaded about the time he uploaded a minor adjustment to fix an issue with the plugin and the wordpress visual editor. He had visited both blogs and suggested I download and install the plugin again and see if it worked now.

Sean had a very busy day on this release date and was tweaking and fixing on the fly and took the time to find our sites, get the contact phone number and call to get it working. Incredible, talk about impressed . . .

After uploading the new file all worked perfectly.

I now have an archives page on this site and the Tucson Real Estate in the News site.

Follow Sean’s instruction at the download and install link above and you will have a great additional page to your blog making it even easier for your readers to check your archives and adding a nice SEO feature to your blog.

Sean is one Geek with Laptop I’m bookmarking and adding to my blogroll.

That’s Sean’s avatar from MyBlogLog at the top of this post. Look for it around the blogosphere.

Thanks again Sean for a great plugin, and follow-up that totally blew me away.

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