Setup | Real Estate Blog Lab

Wordpress 2.2.1 Upgrade

By Dave Smith Wednesday June 27, 2007

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red roses Today I took the plunge once again and upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress 2.2.1 here at the lab. I don’t know about you but these things make me nervous every time I do them. As you can see I’m giving roses for this mini upgrade, for all except the spellchecker.

There were a series of small fixes to behind the scenes issues as well as a couple of security upgrade issues in this release. You can read about those at Wordpress 2.2.1 Upgrade

This one was smooth and easy and I still found I had a bug with the spellchecker.

I’ll do a separate post on the Wordpress Spellchecker issue. There is a workaround. I really like it when it works.

I’ve got the other two main blogs I run which I need to upgrade. I’ve been putting that off but really need to do it. The full preview window makes it well worth the time and effort to upgrade.

For a complete look at the process read Wordpress 2.2 Upgrade for The Real Estate Blog Lab.

PS. I received the roses from my wonderful wife for the annual rite of passage on the 23rd. The roses don’t look this good now that’s why I take pictures. After the post on photo envy I figured what the heck, give Wordpress some roses.

Plugoo vs Meebo

By Dave Smith Monday June 11, 2007

Plugoo interface image The other night I was getting the Scoop on Michigan Real Estate when I noticed Maureen had a new IM thingy (technical term) on her blog.

Plugoo isn’t a plug-in. It is a script that I put in a text box in the widgets setup screen once the Plugoo account was setup.

You can see it at the bottom of the navigation on the right side.

Plugoo Getting Started

Go to Plugoo.com and setup a user account. Now I know that usually is a no brainer and maybe I was exceptionally tired last night when I did this. Tired or not one thing I hate about Plugoo is the user interface. It is not intuitive at all.

I’ll try and make this process easier for those older than 7. Anyone younger just keeps clicking at the speed of light till something they recognize pops up.

plugoo login screen Here is what I mean look at this screen capture of the right side of the Plugoo screen. If you have an account it is obvious where to register.

Step one says to create and activate an account. Where do you click to create an account?

What they don’t tell you. You have to already have an IM account and you pick one of the six IM logos and click on the arrow at the bottom.

Then you get to the create an account. Perfectly clear RIGHT!

Number 2 it somehow did on its own. I said yes that was it.

Number 3 again was quite the challenge. But I managed after several tries to get it to save, that is once I found the save buried in the details of the page.

plugoo setup screen The setup screen looks like this but there is no save button. I found out you can’t just get the default setting because you have to make a change to get the save button to even appear.

Since I was testing I didn’t care about fancy setup I just wanted to get the thing and see if it created errors or not; if it did, GOODBYE PLUGOO.

But, it didn’t create a single error; thus this post.

Once you have it setup copy the HTML code at the bottom and copy it where you want the plugoo window to appear. I created a new text box for the widget and copied the script code into it.

Plugoo Cool Stuff

One thing I think is really cool about Plugoo. If someone starts to type in the plugoo IM box and I’m not online, it opens a conversation in my MSN Instant messenger (which is never off on my computer) and I can type in the MSN window and it is sent to the blog Plugoo window.

I can put Plugoo on all the blogs and the websites and if someone starts a conversation I know it immediately. This is a great feature.

The little boxes in the upper right on the Plugoo window will let you detach the Plugoo window from the blog and open in it’s own window. It is possible for a user to detach the Plugoo window, close your blog and continue the conversation.

Plugoo Beta Caveats

Here are some things I wish they would change for the next upgrade.

I have it set to the widest setting they have, I wish it would go wider for those blogs t hat have wide navigation. I like to be able to read more than just a couple of words per line.
I don’t like the single line interface for user input when communicating with you.
Put the save button on the setup screen and don’t be so cute with the programming to make it only visible when you save.
Make the save button more prominent in a typical location not in the middle of the selection options.
Explain the home page create account process for those that don’t know you have to have an existing service.

I honestly believe that more people would us Plugoo but they get frustrated trying to set up a user account or the Plugoo screen and they simply leave and move on.

In conclusion:

It is at the bottom of my navigation because I’m only testing it on here for errors not functionality. I don’t expect anyone to ever find it down there.
It will be difficult for a blog with a single navigation column to find a place for plugoo above the fold. Much easier on a blog with two column navigation one column for the post.
No you can’t get your image to appear in the Plugoo window like it shows at the top of this post. I did that because we just had a new set of photos taken and it was a place I could see what a small version of one of them looked like. : )

Meebo have an easier process and setup. I like the look of the interface better. But it creates error and you have to remember to log in. Plugoo requires no log in. It will send messages to your existing IM account if you aren’t online in the blog.

Hopefully Plugoo will improve with the next version incorporating some of the nicer things from Meebo while maintaining code that is W3C compliant.

Overall, it gives you a means to communicate with people on your blog and you don’t have to deal with W3C validation errors.

Wordpress 2.2 upgrade for Real Estate Blog Lab

By Dave Smith Saturday May 19, 2007

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

Backup all the files
Deactivate all the plug-ins
Install the new files overwriting the old ones
Run upgrade.php
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

spell check error 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!

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.

Single Property Sites – Setting up Wordpress

By Dave Smith Monday February 26, 2007

Setting up the wp-configure.php file

Before you can install Wordpress you have to have a valid MYSQL database setup and you have to create the wp-configure.php file.

Here is the current place to go to get The latest version of Wordpress.

Wordpress comes with a wp-sample-configure.php file. You can open this using notepad if you don’t have a file editor for html or php files.

In the previous post Single Property Sites – Hostingwe had you write down the MYSQL database number for our example we are using 159 as the database number.

Here is what it looks like and the highlighted words are the ones you need to fill in.

// ** MySQL settings ** // define('DB_NAME', 'mystreet'); // The name of the database define('DB_USER', 'mystreet'); // Your MySQL username define('DB_PASSWORD', 'listings'); // ...and password define('DB_HOST', 'mysql159.secureserver.net'); // 99% chance you won't need to change this value// You can have multiple installations in one database if you give each a unique prefix $table_prefix = 'wp_'; // Only numbers, letters, and underscores please!// Change this to localize WordPress. A corresponding MO file for the // chosen language must be installed to wp-includes/languages. // For example, install de.mo to wp-includes/languages and set WPLANG to 'de' // to enable German language support. define ('WPLANG', '');/* That's all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */define('ABSPATH', dirname(__FILE__).'/'); require_once(ABSPATH.'wp-settings.php'); ?>

Once you have filled in the information for the database you just created save this file as wp-configure.php

When we set up the hosting we created a folder called “mystreet” this is where we want to upload the Wordpress files including the wp-configure.php file you just edited.

Don’t upload the wordpress folder, just the files inside the folder to the “mystreet” folder you created for the property.

Installing Wordpress

Now comes the easy part of the installation process.

Go to your browser and type in the following

“http://www.domainname.com/foldername/wp-admin/install.php”

If it is a subdomain it will be “http://subdomain/domainname.com/foldername/wp-admin/install.php”

If the configure.php file is right it will install. If not go back and check your database, username, description and password to the database. When it installs you are given the login which is always “admin” and a password to enter.

Write down the password and go ahead and login.

Change the password
Fill in your email address
Change the blog description
Save

The next thing I do is immediately delete the “about” page and “hello world” post and comment. You want to get rid of these right away before they get picked up on the web.

Here is where we are headed

Single site snap shot

It won’t be long and you can have a site up that is your time shifted 24/7 open house.

Setting up Wordpress now begins. Here are some of the things we will be covering.

Set your category names
Set the permalink structure
pick a theme
upload your plugins
activate the plugins

For now:

Go take some good photos of the place
Scan the documents you want to link to
- Seller Property Disclosure Statement
- Lead based paint of if built before 1978
- Run a CMA and convert to pdf if desired
- Create a full color flyer and link to it.
Find the places and activities of interest near the property

That’s enough for now. We will go into each of these in post to follow.

Hey, it might seem like a lot, but in just three posts you’ve learned