Holmes Applicance Introduces Computer Cooling Solution?

Posted on June 30, 2009
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How the kitchen window fan saved my A$$

Here is a silly little blog post that I wanted to share with you about an ugly experience I had with my failed heat sink fan.

Kitchen Fan Holmes Appliance, mostly known for its line of fans and dryers has become the next big player in the CPU heat sink cooling industry for the AMD Phenom II X4 Class of CPU’s. Although the headline was meant more as a pun on the situation, the Holmes Dual 10" bi-directional window fan fit the bill as a computer cooling solution just shortly after my Thermaltake Ruby Orb fan tanked on me. With little warning screens and bells chiming away the system automatically shut down Friday afternoon putting me effectively out of business without even the slightest hint there was a problem. Its one of my petty character flaws trying to keep my system as clean as I can almost to the point its compulsive. So with Q-Tip and cleaner in hand I went about cleaning all the little ports and fan blades in the throughout my system, apparently bumping the Orb in a way that set it in a downward spiral to failure. Just 4 hours after cleaning the system, BAM! down she went. Normally this isn’t an issue, just replace it with a backup heat sink fan and be done with it. Yeah, thats what I thought too. Turns out the ASUS mainboard was built for specific types of heat sink solutions and not just any fan would fit. Being down, unable to work over the weekend, simply could not happen. Or at least not happen at a worse time than last weekend where wrapping up outstanding projects was essential.

Although not a real big issue initially to see a CPU Heat Sink fan go, I was a bit surprised at how quickly it went. Thermaltake is semi famous for delivering high quality computer cases and cooling products popular in high end gaming systems and workstations like my Phenom II X4 system. That was right up until I realized that it could get real serious however when you discover that no one in the area offered Thermaltake products, much less the Ruby Orb Heat Sink setup. A weekend replacement was out of the question and mail order, although the only solution for fully restoring the system, could not take place fast enough. What to do?

Desperately needing the system back online to finish projects already pushing long overdue, I decided to cannibalize my other mainboards in hopes that a CPU fan would fit the bill. No such luck, since the Orb and RAM cooling were tied in together I was pretty sure I was done for 4 or so days. After an entire afternoon of trying to fix the Orb with super glue and some plastic weld from a hot iron it was clearly pointless to try and revive the fan to a semi working order while a replacement was ordered. Could not stay down another day, I opted instead to lay the box on its side, pile on the heat sink compound combined with an older Pentium fan and hope it kept the CPU cool enough to work with. It worked fine so long as I didn’t try to use the machine, running at an average of 112 Fahrenheit. Its a little hot but it would survive until the new Orb arrived. However, having a semi-cool machine in non working or non usable order would not do as it ran at nearly 150 Fahrenheit with applications open which was just at the overclock temperature. I needed a way to keep the case extra cool by blasting cold air down onto the heat sink so I could work. I’m lucky I guess in that regard because my office has an AC port directly above my desk so there was no short supply of cold air, but getting it into the case required something extra. I decided to take the dual fan out of the kitchen window and place it over the open computer case with both fans at full speed. Although I can’t use Firefox with more than two or three tabs open (firefox, you stinking memory hog), and I can’t use Photoshop or any Microsoft Office products, but Dreamweaver, FTP and phpEdit Pro could still be used without jacking the CPU temp beyond 120 degrees (spikes to 140 sometimes). Anyway, below are a couple of crappy photos from my very old digital camera showing my desperate solution to keep me in business.

Kitchen Fan 2

Kitchen Fan 3

Convert WordPress Categories to Tags

Posted on June 28, 2009
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Categories to Tags to Categories

Have you ever been in a position where you come to expect certain things to be done certain ways only to discover that your expectations were the real limitation in getting something done? This happens many times where I approach a project following a pretty standard protocol when working with database related projects. 95% of the time, when I need to make a bulk database edit in any web based project I usually start with phpMyAdmin, some SQL strings and possibly a bulk find and replace using either Notepad++ or a little PHP to achieve what I’m after. I call this kind of work “grunt work” because its laborious and repetitive and I usually assign it to my brother who specializes in data conversions and migrations. Recently I found myself facing this task when asked to first import blogger posts into WordPress 2.8 and then perform a bulk update by replacing all of his <div class="articletitle"> instances with <h1>. Why exactly the titles of the posts were wrapped in the DIV tags I’m not sure but the challenge was how to do this with the simultaneous replacement of the proper H1 closing tags as not to alter any other possible DIV instances. PHP comes into play at that point with the string replace which worked fine. Having exported the SQL to a CSV file and saving it to the server, the process took barley 5 minutes. The WordPress Tags were next on the clients list and at first I figured that Id need to script something a bit more involved to achieve this. This is where my initial misplaced expectation had been placed because I knew that it would take some time and I really didn’t want to start my day with the task.

The real challenge in my mind was how to convert all those dozens and dozens of WordPress Categories that were imported from Blogger into their proper or should I say desired “tag” for a better structure of the blogs overall functionality. Not really wanting to script anything, knowing that it would take a bit of time, luckily I remembered seeing but never using a clever little feature in an older install of WordPress that makes this process pretty straight forward and simple. So simple in fact that its barely worthy of a blog post, but I’ll call it a WordPress Tip because I’m sure someone out there must be curious how to do this. The process goes like this;

Always make a backup of your database. Always!
Next, navigate to your WordPress admin panel.
Then, navigate to Posts >> Categories and at the very bottom on the right you will see “Categories can be selectively converted to tags using the category to tag converter..
Simply select the categories you wish to convert and run the process.

Painless, fast and effective, once the conversion is verified you can now take advantage of this excellent feature by using TAGS in all of your posts.

Template Monster Conversion

Posted on June 25, 2009
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OpenRealty, WordPress and Joomla

From time to time I get asked what the average cost is for template conversions related to those published by Template Monster in order to have a CSS / XHTML Layout ported to a particular site solution. To convert a Template Monster template to WordPress, Joomla or OpenRealty, the average fee is $150 – $250. In order to receive an accurate quote please submit a contact form request to me and include the Template ID#. Its important to keep in mind that some features in the Template Monster templates are not ideal for all sites and some features are downright insane to even consider. Some features we generally do not convert are the contact pages where forms are concerned, flash navigation and usually sound files but there are exceptions. Feel free to contact us today for a quote.

OpenRealty Weekly Tips

Posted on June 18, 2009
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I’ve added a new category today to my blog where I’m going to write a tip of the week for OpenRealty users which will began as a jumping off point for a different type of documentation I have in the works. I like OpenRealty, always have and likely always will. While OpenRealty is a pretty good product used by thousands and thousands of website owners, agents, brokers and the like, I think many end users generally follow a pretty basic approach when publishing using the product. What I’ve been doing over the years is making OpenRealty behave differently and in unique ways without the need for core modifications, hacks, addons, or by needing complex php code to make it dance like we want.

In my previous post I dropped in a quick tip about adding HTML Markup to the details fields in some instances when creating or editing listings features. Although this is very mundane and rather basic, its none the less a rather easy to implement tip that can have substantial display and presentation benefits when rendering content. I’ve been adding HTML markup to agent details fields for some time now and by simply including links, markup and even some header tags, we can dress up the agent details page with very little effort. These are the types of things I’m going to present to you in my weekly articles under this new category. I have my brand spanking new theme done and ready to apply which was designed to enhance my posts in the future with better, cleaner, and easier to read content. Now that I’ve updated my SlideShow Pro license, dropped in my newest extensible options panel and will be including live examples of all of my 22 FREE add-ons and plug-ins, this will be a nice feature where I can give support and tips for the products I develop with.

3 New OpenRealty Addons Pending Release

Posted on June 18, 2009
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Slide Show Pro Add-on

Slideshow pro is one of the nicest and most feature rich flash slideshow and gallery tools available. A commercial product, SSP has been a favorite of mine since we first used it on a real estate site three years ago in place of the OpenRealty default listing_detail_slideshow.html template. With this add-on, we basically use the listing photos to generate the SSP slideshow where the thumbnail images are actually part of the slideshow navigation. I had planned at some point to also include optional additional gallery items in the SSP but realized it would be a bit lofty and likely never used feature. This add-on as with all of my addons is 100% free GNU/GPL. I’ll publish it for download once I hear back from SSP about the use of their logo in my add-on icon. I’ve submitted the add-on to them for review. For those interested in learning more about SlideShow Pro, please visit Slide Show Pro Here.

You will need to either purchase a copy of SSP or use the default swf file I’ve included for your slideshows. Slideshow Pro is in my professional opinion one of the most affordable solutions of its type considering the features and exceptional quality they have built into this product. What you get with my add-on is the code to make SSP work in OpenRealty listings details pages and an example 400×300 slideshow.swf. Once you paste in the template tag, it will render the 400×300 presentation set with basic transitions.

High Slide Add-on

While working on an automotive website using OpenRealty, I had a chance to revive an old beta version of an add-on I had built for use on the WP Featured site after abandoning it for more important project. Our customer really wanted to include a nice way to do a jQuery type ThickBox or ThinBox feature for image presentation. Having worked with the commercial version of the best or should I say coolest JavaScript Thumbnail Sliders on the market, the HighSlide Viewer, I knew this was the way to go. So, wanting to take advantage of an OpenRealty feature for the image captions, we completed this older add-on to work with the latest release of the JS HighSlide Viewer to be a totally hands off feature that generates the viewer automatically including the display of the image caption you add in the OpenRealty image editor. This add-on is free and will be released as soon as I complete the documentation for it. Its a painfully simply add-on that I think you and your clients will certainly enjoy using. To read more about the HighSlide Viewer visit their website. One last quick note about image publishing in OpenRealty;

A QUICK Little Open Realty Tip.

I really like OpenRealty in part because its not exceptionally difficult to modify for some more common or basic features. Take for instance the method used to publish listing details and how the data is stored and presented. OpenRealty fields by and large are pretty basic which makes them easy to customize on a per project basis. There are times I’ll even change the path in the OpenRealty core files used for the display of the nophoto.gif’s default location to look instead to the current template/images/ folder. This allows for template designers to add a custom one matching the design of their theme. But it gets a little better when it comes to the listings management where photos are concerned.

Did you know that in the captions field in OpenRealty you can paste in some basic HTML markup for a better presentation of the caption text? Its true, I routinely modify the core admin panel for clients all the time where we include a very basic GNU/GPL WYSIWYG editor for many of the fields in OpenRealty including the fields saved as “textarea”. Site owners can then include H tags, spans and some other real basic markup which gets rendered in the listings details page. Naturally you don’t need to do any core modifications to paste in your title tags or even paragraph and bolding tags for this simple little tip. But more advanced users will take advantage of this in places like the Agent pages where you can add details about the agent by pasting in full HTML markup for a better looking agent page. More on this later.

Featured Listings Add-on

Next is this very old, very well used, and widely seen in many of our OpenRealty projects across the web; the featured listings addon. I contracted to have this developed by Serious PHP nearly 4 years ago and it worked fine for what we needed. I’ve tested, modified, and updated the code since then and having used this add-on in literally dozens and dozens of websites, it remains one of my most often used in my inventory. This add-on makes the creation of multiple featured listings a breeze. You define the name of your featured listing instance, specify the criteria including number to display, specify vertical, horizontal or animated (all based on the templates you place in for featured listings) and your done. Paste in the generated template tag where you want the featured listings to show and it will render the layout based on your pre-defined templates. Since this uses some of the basic code we use in our Menu Creator, both are being updated for release together. Yes, its 100% free.

Dwellicious for OpenRealty

Posted on June 10, 2009
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Here is the beta version first release of the new Dwellicious addon. It will provide a bookmark link on the listings details page for your properties. The nice thing about OpenRealty is that you can assign templates by class for listings details and thereby make this feature available for certain classes. This addon is published by Chad Broussard from Web Marketing Group and developed by Damian Danielczyk

When you install this add-on it is important to first navigate to your admin panel to initialize the addon then you can place the template tag as outlined in the instructions directly into your listings details page. To change out the icon, simply upload your icon to the addons/dwellicious/images folder. This is a beta release but should work just fine for production websites.

Three New Plug-ins Released

Posted on June 10, 2009
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This week we released three FREE plug-ins for WordPress and one for Open-Realty which extends client contact management features to OpenRealty sites. These three plugins have actually been built initially to solve a few issues with some of the UltimateIDX client sites. Google PPC (pay per click) is growing in usage with many real estate websites and as a result, we have found that there are times the increase in traffic can sometimes coincide with an MLS update rendering the PPC page to error out or time out. To stay on top of this and other elements of real estate website design we have released the following three plugins.

WP Critical Page Monitor

From UltimateIDX, the WordPress Critical Page Monitor does little more than ping a user defined set of pages via a CRON job keeping the status of the page responder in sync with the CPM. When the CPM encounters a time out or a response other than a valid response it will send the site administrator an email and an SMS message. When your PPC page goes down, regardless of the page status, you still pay money for each and every click that comes via the Google PPC. This tool was developed for the purpose of monitoring the pages you invest PPC into. You can download the plug-in FREE OF CHARGE on the UltimateIDX site once WordPress approves it for their extensions directory. I hope to have documentation done by weeks end.

WP Random Content

This was initially built to save us the headache of having to always fix changes to one of our client sites where he would break the template layout by trying to change random hard coded elements and images. Frustrated with the endless support and fixes I decided to create a plug-in to make the changes he wanted a much easier task without having to modify the core theme files. This plug-in does one thing and one thing only, it randomizes anything you put into it. From text, advertising code, links, images, banners, even post elements. Simply navigate to the plug-in interface in WordPress, add the elements or images you wish to randomize and you are done. Can work without widget enabled templates but is ideal with them. Again this plug-in is 100% free. A version for OpenRealty is also ready to roll and is also 100% free GNU / GPL which you can request by email until I have a chance to finish up my download page. You may have noticed I’ve been working on that page to clean it up in preparation to release all of our addons. I’m done with commercial OpenRealty addons, all of my addons are now 100% free.

WP News Feed

This plug-in actually came out of an idea presented by a friend of mine at the University of Washington I call the “U of W Super Blogger”. For about a year, I’ve been using a little RSS tool called Simple Pie RSS that was hard coded into a Yahoo tabbed set of PHP pages I created to do my daily check list with. When my friend looked at the idea, he suggested we make it a WordPress plug-in because such a tool would eliminate many of his time consuming search for industry related news. Most people subscribe to RSS feeds via their email program or by using an online service as we have come to learn. Since Mark is a super blogger, I take his suggestions serious. Let me explain a little how it works and why we went forward in creating it.

With my RSS empowered daily check list, I run down my normal list of links to client sites (I like to stay on top of them to see how they are ranking in the SERPS) and I read over notifications from the servers among other things like stats and such which I’ve had coded into this tool of mine. One of the most valuable features is that I have multiple RSS feeds plugged into a Yahoo Tabbed interface which I use to follow industry news from many of my favorite blogs, forums and news wires. Now, although Google and other online services do have a feature to allow something similar, we decided to create the WP News Feed WordPress plug-in to provide the blogger with a clean and easy to use tool for adding RSS feeds to the admin panel. Since tabs would be a bit messy if the number of feeds went beyond say 5 or 6, we opted instead to use a jQuery accordion type feature that puts each successive RSS feed in its own accordion container. Once installed, I simply add the RSS feeds I stay on top of, set the number of items to display, give the feeds a title and I’m set ready to go. Now I have a quick and easy way to look for new things to blog about. I get to add in all my favorite blogs like the Bryan Ruby CMS Report, WordPress news and Joomla news among others giving me a little bit of a euphoric sense of being informed by staying on top of those things that interest me related to my industry. There you have it. The plug-in, as usual, is 100% free GNU / GPL. Before I forget, I would like to extend my gratitude and thanks to Damian Danielczyk for helping us fix and produce cleaner code for working releases of all of our recent plugins.

All In One SEO

Posted on June 6, 2009
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Building WordPress sites in a CMS format just got a whole lot better. Michael Torbert, the developer of the mega popular All In One SEO WordPress plug-in, announced and released a new CMS enhanced version the plug-in by adding some uniquely important features to CMS structured sites. After working with Michael to hash out some of the new features and presenting our code modifications we have been using for a few months, I was pleased to see that in every site we apply the pre release version of the plug-in to, solved a unique issue present only in CMS type configured WordPress sites. Let me explain a little;

One of the most under utilized features being used with WordPress is the feature that provides a way for WordPress to function more as a CMS (Content Management Solution) combined with the powerful blogging ability as opposed to just a blog. The feature is especially attractive to website owners that want to have all the control and publishing abilities to maintain their site without the overtly complex and lofty functionality of a full blown CMS solution. Having built nearly a hundred of these types of sites, we had come to discover that when using the All In One SEO plug-in with a WordPress CMS type setup, that duplicate or identical meta keywords and meta description details were shared for the home page as well as the blog landing page. This could be a potential hazard for the SEO efforts of the site.

Receptive and appreciative I’m glad to say that working with Michael proved to be a favorable endeavor having had the experience in the past where some developers are not nearly as professional nor friendly. What Michael had done was keep us in the loop as he updated his plug-in by allowing us to help beta test and provide code to make the plug-in as CMS friendly as can be. What you get now in addition to its already essential SEO friendly features is the power to control your details and keywords for all aspects and areas of your blog akin to the CMS method of site building. Michael had also added a new toggle feature which allows for a Dynamically Generate Keywords for Posts Page. What happens here is when you assign a page for the posts and home page you can either dynamically generate the keywords or set them statically which has its uses in some circumstances. Be sure to download the latest version for your WordPress CMS to investigate further.

Menu Creator for OpenRealty

Posted on June 5, 2009
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Here is the BETA version of the Menu Creator add-on for Open Realty. Its rather complex but none the less does work. Its basically a modification of the WordPress Menu Creator which it is designed to function in similar characteristics with this version. There are lots of changes I’ll be making to the add-on this weekend to bring it current with the WP features but for now, those interested should at least beta test it and see if its something you would want to use. For the WP user, visit this link for the WordPress Menu Creator Version

Usage of this addon for OpenRealty basically works like this. You create the menu instance, add the links to the menu and place a tag like this anywhere in your template { menucreator 1,2 } this would display menu 1 up to 2 levels deep. The first number is always the menu number and the second is optional but will be a numeric value for how many levels you want to display. The output is super clean XHTML Compliant Un-Ordered lists and it does support images for menu items.

Download Guides Addon for OpenRealty

Posted on June 5, 2009
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Again, having been asked a lot about the status of this item, here is the BETA 3 Version of the Guides add-on for OpenRealty. This version has NO documentation and was briefly outlined in the following post as to what it was designed for and how to basically use it. http://www.jaredritchey.com/open-realty-tutorials-and-guides/

When you install this add-on it is important to note that the next pending release will feature an option for remote tutorials and the limitation here is the remote url feature that some servers do not support. When you update to the next version it will need to install a new table and folder structure will change. I had considered an alternative method using CURL but we ultimately settled on an RSS link method which seems to work best. If you check back later I’ll try and get that version posted so you can have access to the current inventory of FREE OpenRealty tutorials and guides.

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Holmes Applicance Introduces Computer Cooling Solution?

How the kitchen window fan saved my A$$

Convert WordPress Categories to Tags

Categories to Tags to Categories

Template Monster Conversion

OpenRealty, WordPress and Joomla

OpenRealty Weekly Tips

3 New OpenRealty Addons Pending Release

Slide Show Pro Add-on

High Slide Add-on

A QUICK Little Open Realty Tip.

Featured Listings Add-on

Dwellicious for OpenRealty

Three New Plug-ins Released

WP Critical Page Monitor

WP Random Content

WP News Feed

All In One SEO

Menu Creator for OpenRealty

Download Guides Addon for OpenRealty

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