How To | Real Estate Blog Lab

Have a Little Fun With CSS

By Dave Smith Tuesday March 17, 2009

This afternoon I got to wondering if I put a div class at the top of a post using the HTML tab would it format just the one post with a little CSS coding in the style.php.

WordPress 2.5 More Observations

By Dave Smith Friday April 25, 2008

Manage still exists but Options is gone. The Options have been scattered about various places on the Dashboard. Settings, Plugins, Users are now top right. They aren’t on a tab just sitting there to themselves.

Brother MFC-5460CN Much Less Than a Printer

By Dave Smith Sunday March 25, 2007

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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. . .

Google Site Search

By Dave Smith Tuesday February 27, 2007

Have you ever done a Google search and when you clicked on a link it went to the homepage of the site and not to the information you were looking for.

Most of us take 1 millionth of a second to see it isn’t there and rather than try and find navigation to the page we click back and move on to the next search result. I wanted a way to keep them from hitting that back button and moving on.

I like the site search on our blogs and went looking for something to do the same on our web site. I found Google Site Search.

Google Site Search is a great way to let people enter their search term and this time it will only search your site. There is a good chance they won’t be so quick to click away once they see this search option. I’ve tested it on our Tucson Real Estate site and it returns the exact page reference that came up in the original search taking your visitor to the page they wanted in the first place.

Here is the process to put Google SiteSearch on your Homepage:

Go to the Google Site Search Page
check the agree to terms of service
click the get code button
Scroll down to the bottom option code window
Reread 4. There are three sets of code, you want the bottom one.
Copy it.

Here is the catch, yeah there always seems to be a catch doesn’t there. This code will produce 35 WC3 Errors on you homepage.

I found this on a routine check of our homepage on the WC3 validator page. It took me a few minutes to clean up the code so it would validate.

Here is the process:

Change all CAPS to lower case ex. INPUT to input
Make all lines of code self closing including <br> to <br />
Put all values in quotes ex. input type=”text” NOT input type=text
A rule of thumb is after = close in quotes
remove the </form> at the end
it isn’t needed you’ve made all lines self closing
change checked to checked=”checked”

Here is the code as it should changed to validate.


<form action=”http://www.google.com/search”/>
<input type=”hidden” name=”ie” value=”utf-8″/>
<input type=”hidden” name=”oe” value=”utf-8″/>
<table bgcolor=”#FFFFFF”><tr><td>
<a href=”http://www.google.com/“>
<img src=”http://www.google.com/logos/Logo_40wht.gif” border=”0″ alt=”Google”/></a></td><td>
<input type=”text” name=”q” size=”31″ maxlength=”255″ value=”"/>
<input type=”submit” name=”btnG” value=”Google Search”/><input type=”hidden” name=”domains” value=”yourdomain.com”/><br /><input type=”radio” name=”sitesearch” value=”"/> WWW <input type=”radio” name=”sitesearch” value=”yourdomain.com” checked=”checked”/>
yourdomain.com <br /></td></tr></table>

You can’t copy this code from the page it won’t work.

I’m not the brightest bulb in the pack when it comes to this code in a post stuff. Here is the googlesitesearch.pdf file.

Once it is open
select the I bar select function
swipe the code
copy it.

You can now paste it into your web page, changing the three references to “yourdomain” located near the bottom of the code to . . . . . you got it, your domain.
DO NOT CHANGE names=”domain”

Once you have added and saved you can use the validator page to check for errors on your homepage.

Assuming you didn’t have any errors before adding this code.

I really like the functionality of this piece of code. It is just too bad that Google would provide a piece of code that is so obviously out of standard coding practices for today.

And if anyone can tell me how I can start putting code in a post that can simply be copied and applied. Please let me know.

Wordpress 2.1 Text Editor Why I hate it

By Dave Smith Thursday February 1, 2007

I’ve spent so much time trying to get 2.1 up and running with the Tiga theme and various plugins I haven’t done much in the way of posting. Now I’m trying to post and the new editor is biting me hard. Of course I discover this after saying it might be ok to upgrade to 2.1.

IF YOU ARE USING THE BUILT IN TEXT EDITOR DO YOURSELF A FAVOR AND DON’T UPGRADE.

I have a lot to write about today because for the past couple of days I’ve been trying to figure out how this new editor works. The old editor was pretty simple to use. For example

If I wanted to display an image to the right with text to the left. I inserted the image. selected the image and selected justify right. That would put the image inside a div and I was off and running.

However, the new version with the code tab doesn’t work that way, and when I try and put a div statement in by hand it removes it. And you might even notice that in code view, for the most part it isn’t like the HTML editor of the past there are no visible paragraph or break tags.

So instead of writing I’m trying to figure out the editor with no great luck. I’ve searched on Wordpress on changes to this thing, I’ve found nothing.

Now I’m trying to find an editor I can use that will allow me to do what I want and hope that someone will fix this stupid editor. I can’t believe I’m the only person out there that wants to display their images beside text.

Any suggestions on an editor? The only reason I didn’t try blogjet, no technorati tags. I really like that feature. I see there is a new blogjet 2.0 out there. I’ll do some more reading on it.

Again, any suggestiong. Trust me I am open, I just don’t want to give up any of the functionality like tags, technorati tags, images beside text. Tweaking from a code view when I want to.

I want a smart editor but not one that thinks it is smarter than me.