Now Hiring PHP Coders

Posted on February 17, 2008
Filed Under Code Snippets, Design | Leave a Comment

Seeking PHP / MySQL Coder

Are you a good PHP coder who can code snippets quickly? I’m looking to hire another PHP coder to help with some small customization and snippets for projects we are working on. I’m taking all my years of code that we have held for commercial projects and converting them for FREE resources in my new resource directory. I’d like a person to be well versed in PHP 4+ and although 5+ is the current thing its not the supported thing universally so I need someone who is conscious of that. I’d like the coder to also be well versed in code sanitation to prevent potential security issues in these old snippets once updated.

The criteria for the coder is as follows;

Commit to a 25 projects minimum and charge accordingly.
Have a valid phone number in either the US, UK, or Canada preferably but not required.
Can be paid by certified funds or a verified PayPal account.
Must use my RTDS (Rapid Template Design Series) coding guideline.
Should understand AJAX and certainly databases.
Should understand XML at least from a dynamic generation perspective.
Must code cleanly with well commented code.
Dont Steal other peoples code.
Must be at least casually familiar with a few open source applications and have a good understanding of string replace type template engines.

Please contact me using this sites contact form and in your contact please include a phone number and the times of day or week you can work. Please be fair and competitive in pricing.

Now Hiring Photoshop Designers

Posted on February 17, 2008
Filed Under Design | Leave a Comment

Photoshop designers needed for layouts based on our grid system

Are you an Adobe Photoshop designer? I’m looking to hire a full time Photoshop designer to create layouts using our RTDS system in design. I’ve considered hiring through freelance gateways but language barriers have always proven to be burdensome and quality isn’t always guaranteed. NO XHTML or CSS required, just Adobe Photoshop.

The criteria for the designer is as follows;

Commit to a 25 - 50 layout contract and priced accordingly.
Have a valid phone number in either the US, UK, or Canada preferably.
Can be paid by certified funds or a verified PayPal account.
Must use my RTDS (Rapid Template Design Series) for layouts via our GRID system.
Have a good solid understanding of color and color theory. ( I can send you my guides and application )
Home based worker is the ideal for a very specific reason related to the RTDS.
Must be attentive to details and I mean small details as well.
Dont Steal other peoples work.
Yeah, its been said that "Good artists copy and great artists steal" but these layouts must be original work. Inspiration or being inspired by other designers work I’m fine with, after all, who is so arrogant to believe they have an original idea anyway. Just be honest is what I’m asking.

Please contact me using this sites contact form and in your contact please include a phone number and the times of day or week you can work. DON’T quote a price to me without knowing the details first. I want this financially realistic for you so low balling me on price will make me think you are desperate. I want FAIR pricing for good quality work, I’m not looking for a steal, just industry average pricing is fine. I can show you pricing charts if you so desire.

Commercial Products going FREE!

Posted on February 17, 2008
Filed Under Real Estate Websites | Leave a Comment

FREE Plugins, code snippets and products for WordPress and Open Realty

After much consideration and discussion I’ve decided to take many of those items we sell on the other site commercially and discontinue them for commercial sales. Now that www.asiteabove.com was sold I’m putting CSS Design Magic up for sale and CodeFreelance.com as I try to bring things into a more manageable trio of sites.

The reason I’m taking commercial items and making most of them predominantly FREE is that enough of the products sold to such a level that they more than generously covered the cost of development so my intentions are a bit more directed toward Link Bait now.

The products that will remain commercial are coming down in price and now that I’ve almost completed a few multi pack template deals I’ll be working to make more of these items FREE or at least reduced in price. The Dreamweaver Extensions are still FREE including the Joomla Template Kit but an enhanced version that includes video instruction among other things will still sell for $39.95 and may go down to $29.95 if two or more of the packages are purchased in any combination. That includes Zen-Cart, Open Realty, WordPress, Joomla et all.

ALL items have been long since removed from this new server that JaredRitchey.com sits on but will be added back hopefully in the coming weeks.

Open Realty WordPress Registration Bridge

Posted on February 17, 2008
Filed Under Products | 1 Comment

Simultaneously Add Registrations to WordPress and Open Realty

After completing the Listings Plugin, I decided to take a look at the option of having user registrations in WordPress simultaneously add user registrations to Open Realty by creating a new registration module that can be published internally in either a post or page or even sidebar.

The idea is to have people register to your WordPress blog as the primary location for interaction with your Real Estate site and then have that registration be added to the Open Realty DB via a simple bridge so registrants can save searches and take advantage of other registration benefits you present in your listings manager.

Currently this is a drop in snippet and must be configured by hand but after I get enough feedback on the other FREE WP Plugins, this one will be added to the list of FREEBIES. You can see this plugin in action later in the week and naturally you can still request to be a beta tester for the Listings Plugin.

FREE WordPress Real Estate Listings Plugin

Posted on February 16, 2008
Filed Under Real Estate Websites | 3 Comments

Add Real Estate Listings to your WordPress posts and pages

Looking for beta testers this week who have Open Realty and WordPress installed to try out this new 100% Free Plug-in for WordPress. The release date was bumped up to next week then we discovered a small bug where users could mess up their layout if they attempt to link to the listings template on a PLESK server. Although the fix was essentially simple, such errors can be annoying and troublesome to contend with. So the basic criteria for beta testers is as follows;

Open Realty and WordPress must be installed on the SAME server with the SAME account in the SAME domain.
Open Realty should be version 2.3 or above
WordPress should be the latest security patch release or above.
Users should have a standard Open Realty class setup (nothing exotic)
WordPress can be in a sub domain on either PLESK or cPanel at this point. Other configurations welcome.

We ask that the following details get reported back to us in order to publish the WP Addon FREE by months end.

Describe your domain setup and configuration
Test display of featured listings by City, by State, by Agent, by Class and report back any issues.
Describe Issues with binds that use multiple spaces or hyphens, underscores and ampersands.
A link to posts for each of the configurable featured listings details would be ideal for us to examine.

WordPress Featured Real Estate Listings Plug-in Features

I’ve gotten about 75+ emails in the past 4 days regarding this plug-in and of all those I’ve received better than half ask the same question that I have apparently forgotten to list as one of the features. People have asked "will the listings rotate or animate" and the answer to that is YES! Some other common questions are as follows;

Can I display featured listings from my Open Realty install on each of my agent blogs? = YES!
I was designed with this purpose in mind. You operate Open Realty as the main listing manager and your agents should have a WP blog either in sub domains like http://agentname.yoursite.com or http://www.yoursite.com/agentname/ Either way, we have tested and it works flawlessly.
Is there any cost at all EVER? = NO!
I built it because I needed it for sites and clients and I think its the type of thing that would prove beneficial to end users regardless of payment.
Are there credit links to your site in the featured listings? = NO but sometimes YES!
Anyone reading my blog or blogs knows my attitude about offsite links on the front page and offsite links related to credits in some plug-ins. There are NO requirements for you to link back to me and there are no hidden links in the plug-in at all. I would hope that people find this plug-in interesting enough to discuss openly in blogs and forums, but there are none I put in that the user or the search engines would see.
Is it encrypted like your other plug-ins? = NO
use and modify as you see fit, just please leave the commented credits in the source code and please do not redistribute without first getting permission to do so.
Can I use this for my SEO clients ….. et all? = YES!
People have asked me several times about use in different situations and I’ve basically said you can use, include and customize for use in your client projects providing that you DO NOT alter the WordPress Plug-In Update and Source Links. These links are the ones that you may notice in the WP Plug-in configuration. One link will go to WordPress.org for download and the other will go to the developers site, here. If you’re still not sure then you can always email me with your questions.
LAST: Can I display listings on a blog if its not on the same server? = Yes and No!
This has been tested and it works most the time yet on some servers it simply tosses an error. I did however create a hard coded alternative that was going to be sold for $10 on this site which I’ve decided to make available for FREE once this is released. The secondary option will provide you with essentially the same effect to a limited and more complex degree and does require you to get a plug-in for parsing PHP in your posts and pages.

I have several features that will be added in the near future once this version is released and providing you don’t alter the code in the wp-admin panel you will be notified when to update your plug-in as you see with all plug-ins. Some of those features I’m keeping confidential but two of my favorites I can tell you about is the ability to include a single property slide-show feature. This will provide you with a way to write a WordPress blog post about a property you are featuring and have that properties photos rotate in a slide-show. Then, the other feature is to have that same concept above also include a listings mortgage calculator directly into your post content. Now, I can do that already and have the starting fields "price" and "rate" auto fill dynamically from an offsite source (I’ll explain later) so the visitor enters the other elements of the formula to get an idea on costs.

WordPress and Search Engine Optimization - Google Loves WordPress

Now it should be obvious why this plug-in was developed. In my post on the other blog (link in the link section) I wrote about how SEO Experts (many are self proclaimed) are making a spank of $$ simply by installing WordPress and billing you for an effect that is none of their own doing. What is working is WordPress and this plug-in was specifically designed to take Realtor Blogs and help them get listings sold and marketed. Why? Because according to sources all over the web, some claim that as many as 90% of all home purchases are initiated on the internet. To me 90% is amazing.

If Realtors could get just as much attention to their featured listings as they do to their blog that the Search Engines afford them currently they would have a substantial advantage over run of the mill listing display methods in my opinion. Could you imaging how well a site would do if Realtors wrote about the listings they intended on selling that included dynamic features that WordPress offers? Now you see why it was created.

Open Realty WP Plugin Complete!

Posted on February 15, 2008
Filed Under Products | Leave a Comment

WordPress Real Estate Listings - MLS - IDX - RETS

The real estate listings plugin is now complete and is being beta tested on my other domain. I’m going to wrap it up next week and then package it with two or three templates I have in inventory for those interested in using it. I’m testing it at this point with the imported MLS IDX and RETS for the Portland area.

The plugin was first introduced HERE! as a replacement for the previous attempt by creating a mini application inside of WordPress which proved to be just a daunting and pointless task. But after we talked to dozens of people who beta tested the first version many things were discovered. Of those Realtors we spoke with, the majority said they only want to put listings in WordPress so they can use it for SEO purposes for their agency opens and or their MLS listings from their office. Given WordPress is used by so many Realtors to optimize their sites, the ability to add real estate listings enhances the potential of WordPress as a search engine friendly CMS or blog.

WordPress Real Estate Plug-in is 100% FREE!

Whats next in this tool is to provide a way for custom forms to be applied to the listings and to provide a way to add a PDF file and possibly video slide show. After talking with many Realtors we realize that the way they are marketing properties in recent months is by providing pre-defined search forms embedded within the their content. So we have added on my demo a manual way to add search forms by creating a simple JavaScript form generator for Open Realty that is literally as easy as point and click. Now we will soon have a way to provide a Realtor with the ability to write on a community development or a local employer and provide a predefined search form for listings specifically geared to those criteria INSIDE WORDPRESS.

Matt Cutts on Webmaster Tools

Posted on February 14, 2008
Filed Under Real Estate News | Leave a Comment

Matt Cutts - How to optimize your site for google.

Sitting in my bookmarks was a video I had totally forgotten about and upon looking at it again this early morning I realized that this video answers a few questions I’d been asked in one of the forums I’m moderate. "Does Google crawl password protected areas?" The answer of course is no but this video does the ideal job of articulating why.

For a Realtor seeking to maximize their presence on the web, some of the things Matt discusses in this video are many of the things I have been writing about in the forums. Some topics related to the proper link methods are always discussed it seems and more often lately are subjects about requiring users to register prior to viewing listings details is growing in the discussion boards as well. If a user can’t see the data until they log in, then google can’t see it either and its one of those things I tell people to be very conscious of before implementing such requirements on their sites. Here is the video.

Open Realty Featured Listings Offsite Anywhere

Posted on February 12, 2008
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Featured Listings Anywhere v2.0

Version 2.0 of this snippet was updated to provide end users an easy to configure solution for adding featured listings to applications like WordPress, Joomla, vBulletin or other applications by using a pair of simple php inclusions to display the listings.

The framework for this code snippet was designed as part of our FREE WordPress Real Estate Listings Plug-in do out by months end. What I did was have my coder remove the primary set of functions used to display the custom featured listings in WordPress and create a simple solution for displaying Open Realty featured listings on external locations. Some of the basic features include the display of featured listings based on Class, AgentID (perfect for sites that have agent blogs as well as open realty) City, State and soon by zip code among other things.

I like the word framework because it implies that it can be built upon which is exactly why it was carefully planned for so we could easily adapt it for use in four subsequent tools pending release that will use this framework to achieve different things. My concern very early on was this; If I’m spending the money to pay Mark to code these FREE snippets, I need to maximize their potential and avoid running into a mishap of subsequent releases of Open Realty breaking the addons. The solution to prevent this was simple in my eyes. Don’t depend on Open Realty, just the data in the data base and step outside of the Open Realty addon system, so, he did just that. These tools do not require Open Realty to maintain backwards compliant for addon support and at current version, we have tested with various versions of Open Realty as far back as version 2.1 with a clean bill of health. Naturally older versions did not have the CLASS feature, so modifications using listing type also worked well.

The Framework basically gives us the ability to make our WordPress plugin ( A FREEBIE ) and other snippet additions to work without a great deal of change needed to the code. This means that the code thats rendering the featured listings on external sites is the same code (for the most part) that makes The Flash Image Rotator, The Page Flip, our PDF Brochure Generator, Our Google Maps, and the future Flash Virtual Tour to work efficiently OUTSIDE of the addon system. I have long wanted to scrap the use of the JAVA tour feature in Open Realty largely because no one uses JAVA in their browsers and with our new FLASH VIRTUAL TOUR that addon achieves better and cleaner cross compliant control for everyone in hopes that it will encourage tours to become the norm.

Although those items that are currently setup as addons will be sold at $5, most of these snippets will be freeware like the much needed PDF Brochure Generator in Open Realty. The sale of the addons is a sort of forced donation-ware to help me offset the costs associated with paying Mark to do these.

A developer package is also available NOW and includes an unlimited site license among other things for many of the addons mentioned above.

To order the V2.0 of Open Realty Featured Anywhere visit the products page.

Open Realty WordPress Listings Plugin

Posted on February 11, 2008
Filed Under Products, Real Estate Websites | 7 Comments

Real Estate Listings Plugin - WordPress - ReEvaluated

10 months ago I commissioned a programmer to complete a plugin for use in WordPress that would offer some basic listing management features for Realtors that use WordPress as their primary CMS. Successfully, yet unfortunately more expensive than I had wanted to spend, we were able to get the plugin to work pretty effectively. After several beta versions and much discussion among Realtors that financed the plugin, it became painfully obvious that the list of features could continue to grow to a point that the burden and performance concerns related to WordPress would prove counter productive. Mind you, WordPress is fully capable of handling an insane amount of usage and traffic, but the heavier you make the application by packing it with plugins and hacks the slower it becomes. I needed to avoid this at all costs knowing what I know about servers, as I own several for Realtor hosting. So what next? Well first lets go off track and off subject then lets come back to the subject to better articulate why this change in the WordPress listings manager has taken place.

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