Update Itronix IX-250 and IX-260 GPS

Posted on September 16, 2008
Filed Under General | 1 Comment

I get a ton of emails and alot of responses to the original article about my Itronix laptops so today I went in and did a new comment to address the most common questions I get asked.

I found the rest of the drivers in my archive and uploaded those as well so if anyone still needs them please do not hesitate to ask.

In my post located here Itronix Laptop I outline some important “basic” stuff regarding the GPS configuration and Hard Drive updates for the Itronix laptops. Its important to note that the Itronix IX-260 will take any standard 2.5 HD providing you are not attempting to keep the rugged nature of the machine. If however you are then its best to get the IBM rugged drives which can be spendy but have sizes up to 120GB last time I checked.

This is WP Realty which puts OpenRealty into your WordPress Blog

Posted on September 16, 2008
Filed Under General | 5 Comments


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EZ Pro Realty Powered by EZ Pro Realty

New WordPress OpenRealty Plugin

Posted on September 16, 2008
Filed Under General | 3 Comments

New WordPress Real Estate Listings Plugin - 100% FREE!

WordPress Realty is 95% done after working on the code for several weeks leaving only some minor changes in the URL structure left to solve. What WP Realty does is place OpenRealty (or EZProRealty) into the WordPress interface providing the very first and the only TRUE integrated real estate listings manager for WordPress.

Add, Edit, Modify, and Administer Listings in WordPress

By clicking on the control panel image below you can see in the following video that we have managed to get the listings management directly into WordPress while maintaining user and administrator bridging. When you log in as an administrator in WordPress you are simultaneously logged into OpenRealty as an administrator. Users and other member support will also be added in a successive release.

WP Realty WP Realty works with WordPress MU as well. We tested this plugin in WordPress Multi User on a site where the agency has about 10 Realtor blogs and were able to provide the listings in each Realtors blog including searching, contact forms and real estate calculators all of which were core features in OpenRealty.

No modification to OpenRealty will be required at all. In fact the plugin works best with a complete out of box install of OpenRealty using the very vanilla cms integration template. Tested with a half dozen different OpenRealty addons, the WP Realty plugin had no problem displaying things like google maps, loan calculators and even flash animation embedded into the OpenRealty template.

Summary of Features and KNOWN BUGS

Currently there is only two known bugs in our tests and that is the URL path is not relative to the post path which we will fix and there is an occasional glitch in sessions between admin panels which can sometimes require you to log into OpenRealtys admin panel a second time.

Although the second known issue is relatively less important, the first however is not as you will see in our demonstration above. OpenRealty is 100% fully placed within the second post above by using a simple template tag { wp-realty } which will display OpenRealty via the plugin. What you may notice is that if you click on the full view link for this very post that the URL’s for listings do not change. This is our highest priority this week to get the WP Realty plugin working so its available for download.

The commercial version of this plugin has some unique features specifically designed for Real Estate and Automotive firms that need to manage listings in a more commercial setting. The commercial version of this plugin will be available for $199.95 - $499.95 and will include a few very exclusive and custom tools which I will reveal at a later date. $499 can be perceived as a rather costly item for a WordPress blog, but when your sales depends on you and you alone, the cost is trivial when compared to other solutions available we have discovered that can run you 5 times the cost.

A brief hint to some of the features in the commercial variants include search by map, export your listings via XML for nearly a dozen services like Trulia, Google, Yahoo, The Move Channel and many others. We will also have a unique CSV import tool for the automotive and boating industry where people can export their inventory to a CSV file (as in database or MS Excel exports) and the plugin will import those listings into your installation of OpenRealty. I really want to reveal more but I dont want to spoil the surprise.

Features Include
1) Fully Integrated Administrators Panel for OpenRealty
2) Simultaneous Logins between WordPress and OpenRealty
3) Works with my WordPress RETS IDX package integration which brings in vieleRETS into WordPress
4) Works with my current mapping addons
5) Includes WP Featured Sidebar Widget for displaying template based featured listings
6) Includes OpenRealty Flash slide show/
7) Includes the ability to place featured listings based on a three point seach criteria directly into any post any page or any sidebar.
8) More to come….

Hot Properties of Utah Dumps Joomla

Posted on September 9, 2008
Filed Under Design | Leave a Comment

WordPress CMS Power vs Joomla CMS

After nearly two years of using Joomla as the primary website CMS for Hot Properties Real Estate in Spanish Fork Utah, the decision was made to streamline the site for simplicity and overall marketing effectiveness by switching the main site away from Joomla and selecting WordPress CMS instead.

Joomla as you may very well know is the worlds premier CMS solution used by just about every type of government agency, business and media site one can imagine. But Joomla, although the most widely used open source solution for content management driven sites around the world, Joomla can be substantial overkill in many instances. Sites that benefit from Joomla are those where mass media, document management, member management and overall CMS power and flexibility are needed. WordPress on the other hand has grown substantially in recent months and has become much more powerful along the way with an even more effective CMS capability for lighter applications. WordPress as you know is a blogging or journal solution used in an ever increasing frequency for journalism and publishing companies where frequent updates to content are expected.

Real Estate Professionals have in recent months discovered the power of WordPress in making it their primary website management solution now more than ever with the integration options for OpenRealty, the MLS, IDX and even RETS being marketed in various places around the web. For Hot Properties Real Estate, the decision came after looking at the overall picture of what was to be achieved combined with a new found motivation to have their real estate agents actively using and benefiting from blogs.

Real Estate Agent blogs are really nothing new but with the power of WordPress MU (multi user) agencies, brokerages, and even FSBO type marketing services can benefit greatly by offering their agents their own blog on the domain for increased traffic, cross linking potential and more often than not shared maintenance and support. A Real Estate Brokerage benefits greatly by having agents post to a blog located on the parent domain in too many ways to list in this quick little post. But the primary way a Real Estate Office would benefit would be in the large amount of fresh new content being posted inline with the agencies objective which as we all agree, the SERPS love content the way I love coffee, making the site a magnet for the SERPS. Aside from increased traffic for relevant content, agents can display their listings on the blogs in a few ways we provide increasing the marketing potential of their efforts for getting that property sold.

WordPress for Realtors and Car Dealerships - Increase Sales A Thousand Fold

Now this method is not new to us as I’ve personally been pushing the whole WordPress / OpenRealty thing like a disciple. Just a few months prior I had built an automotive site for one of the nations “more popular” dealers which has benefited from the WordPress MU method a thousand times over. So powerful were the results that the site owner would not let me directly link to his site to demonstrate the features in fear his competitors would discover their little secret. Naturally I wont reveal all the specifics, but in general it goes a little something like this.

You take a car dealership and you custom build a WordPress MU solution that provides a blog for departments, sales staff, and management and you toss in a few digital cameras and some crafty guidelines (we included tutorials in video format and printed management docs which I can’t really disclose in full detail) and then turn your people lose. Sales staff members would write about every single automobile they test drove, including their opinions about the autos, their experiences, their likes and even dislikes were allowed within reason. The digital cameras provided each with a means of photographing the engine, the under carriage, the interior and every other facet of the car or truck they wrote about. Can you see the power behind this yet?

Taking this to a rapid conclusion, any person in the business of sales MUST have a blog in my professional opinion if they are to increase their chances of success in this modern web savvy digital world. When you as a company dump into the hands of your sales staff the power of blogging and turn them lose, you will intimidate, over power, and out market the competition.

I plan on expanding on this a great deal in the next post so you should check back because I’m going to reveal several techniques I use for making this work when it comes to increasing sales using a blog. I will discuss Car Sales, Stereo sales, and the retail wholesale markets as well.

Google Launches New Browser - CHROME!

Posted on September 4, 2008
Filed Under General | Leave a Comment

Google launches the beta version of the first new web browser to show up on the scene in many years which Google calls “Chrome”. The new browser borrows many facets and features from similar open source projects and packs in what Google calls a better engine for increased speed, security and web application support.

Built in part using Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox components, the new browser has many promising or should I say aspiring prospects for its future. Google developers set out to build a new web browser with “Today’s Web” in mind. One of the most interesting features is that Chrome comes with a unique way of handling potential browser crashes by opening each tab in its own process in hopes that the tab will ultimately crash and not the browser. I could not get the browser to crash in my tests even when sites with lots of AJAX and other events that notoriously cause FireFox to buckle under the pressure. More testing will tell. Naturally this method does not come without its scrutiny from what I’ve read in blogs regarding this feature. Objective analysis, abusive bad mouthing, or just rant, there seems to be no shortage blog posts pointing out the likes and dislikes behind this feature, some claiming is still quite buggy. Regardless I think the idea behind it is solid and certainly appreciated having had too many browser crashes and losses of data in the past. Tabbed browsing isn’t a luxury, its a necessity. Thanks FireFox for that introduction.

Moving on, a key feature the Google developers articulate in the following video is the Chrome Browsers ability to handle web applications more efficiently. Upon casual examination I did notice an increase speed when visiting a few of my frequented JavaScript / AJAX rich sites. Having examined this for only an hour or so, I did notice there was no clear way to discern if a site had JavaScript errors or not as I’m sure there must be.

Regardless of those initial reviews, to me, Google’s Chrome is what one would expect from a the worlds most prolific search engine. The application feels clean cut, to the point and light which is more pronounced when contrasted against memory hogs like FireFox. Loads fast, runs fast, and its just plain simple to use gives me yet another browser I must test sites in before calling them done; but, is it compliant?

Google Chrome and CSS XHTML Compliance

Having visited a few dozen client sites with the Google Chrome Web Browser revealed none of the expected CSS and or XHTML issues I was sure would toss it a curve ball. From the infamous box model to browser handling of hover events, the Google Web Browser was equally matched to any of the existing compliant browsers.

Today’s designers are ever increasing their adoption of what is known as the CSS RESET introduced by Yahoo and quasi perfected by Eric Meyers known as the Ultimate CSS RESET. The CSS RESET is simply a summary of CSS selectors and declarations specifically built to bring all browsers to the same position on a level playing field. Having used the CSS RESET in all of my work since February of this year, I’ve come to depend on it and any new browser that could threaten the reliability of its use was my initial concern after downloading and installing Google Chrome. I was happy to discover that I wasn’t able to find an issue as of yet. Yippee!

Google Chrome and Security

Beta products can have beta bugs and as expected security issues had been discovered within hours of its beta release. Google developers pride themselves on security as being one of the new browsers foremost note worthy and important features. However security experts, keen on finding problematic security issues (I wish I knew how they did that so quickly) wasted little time in publishing their findings upon discovery just hours after the beta release. I don’t know enough in this regard to comment much further but I will be watching the development closely as a result.

Google Chrome vs these other guys

Where would Google Chrome eventually end up in relation to Internet Explorer - FireFox - Safari - Opera and others I wondered. It is my hope that with Google’s super massive marketing machine and all knowing all seeing web-o-sphere of power that this new browser grow in popularity so fast that it will put some of my least favorite browsers in the dumpster. I’d love to point out all the dozens of reasons why IE-6 is the worst browser on the web, but that has already been done a billion and a half times. In the design business frustrations with IE are par for the course and now that IE is in the midst of launching IE version 8, keeping pace with its past practices, IE will deliver the new browser with some new problems for designers to handle according to the IE blog. Naturally no one in their right mind can stress the need to keep 4.0 and 5.0 browsers in any analysis as both are dead sticks used only by those living in the sticks. No pun intended.

I’m not anti Microsoft for sure, but the birth place of IE was not to deliver a great product it was developed to bury Netscape and having been built with vengeance as a motive its no wonder why it has been substandard from its birth. IE and Netscape were key factors in the anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft if you recall. Therefore, seeing IE lose a chunk more of the market share will not force me into sleepless nights.

It is my hope that the new Google Chrome Browser will catch so much positive buzz on the web that people will download it, use it and make it their primary browsing tool. I personally am going to start using it in addition to FireFox as not to be a hypocrite. Go check it out Google Chrome at your earliest convenience.


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