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 FanHolmes 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.

Ruby OrbAlthough 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? Confusing? It can be. This happens many times where I approach a project following a pretty standard protocol when working with database related projects. In nearly 95% of those situations, needing to make a bulk database edit in any web based project I usually start with phpMyAdmin and after a few SQL strings or possibly a bulk find and replace I can 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;

  1. Always make a backup of your database. Always!
  2. Next, navigate to your WordPress admin panel.
  3. 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..
  4. 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.

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 OpenRealty 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.

My Top 10 Potential Dwellicious Possibilities

Posted on June 3, 2009
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Social Bookmarking for The Real Estate CMS Trend.

Its only been two weeks since I was introduced to dwellicious.com by a client of ours and I’m already more than a big fan. I’m addicted to the potential possibilities that this new service can present to real estate websites. When social networking services are combined with CMS empowered web site solutions like WordPress or Joomla for instance, the climate of the web tends to change in a way that pushes beyond the old humdrum limitations that so often plague boring uneventful and likely ineffective sites. Although varying social and cms implements are really old news, its not as widely embraced in the real estate industry in part because social bookmarking of featured property listings or any listing for that matter had to be done with services not ideally suited for them. Dwellicious surfaces and gives real estate websites something unique, a way to “socialize property listings”. Why you might ask? Well I’ll get to that with my top 10 and you can see why but for now look at a few important things taking place as we go on.

Isn’t there already services available for this type of thing? The Zillows, the Postlets, the Trulias and other types of listing submission solutions do exist so why would dwellicious be unique enough to push the coolness factor? Keep in mind that those sites are not technically social sites by definition of what many consider as befitting of the category. Many real estate websites do implement social bookmarking for listings as I’m sure you have encountered. But as stated above, the methods are really not ideally suited for real estate. For this reason, I’ve given some careful consideration to point out some of the ways we have been brainstorming how Dwellicious can be used as a great tool for the real estate webmaster.

How Realtors can use dwellicious effectively!

1. Implement it!
The simple fact is, those who are currently using it in their sites, do show greater retention per visit and its my belief a greater chance of a repeat visit.

2. Use it for back links.
If someone came to you and said there is a way to have dozens or maybe even hundreds of people add your listings to their social bookmark page, would that be enough motivation to consider the potential here? Dwellicious does not implement a no-follow no-index on the listings or the individual profile pages.

3. Blog with it!
The very reason we built our two new plugins was for the marketing benefit it presents. The WordPress plugin provides a blogger with a way to implement the profile page with the listings into a page or post. Think about this for a moment. Your broker has dwellicious implemented and you decide you will go in and bookmark all of your listings to include into your blog. Could it get any more simple than that? As your listings update so too does the data on your blog. But why stop there? Mortgage lenders, business associates, clients, potential customers, press releases, and any number of potential uses could be displayed on any number of blogs.

I have a Realtor as of yesterday whom agreed to beta test our plugin by first asking her client to register at dwellicious, bookmark her listing on the Realtors site, then use our plug-in to publish the listings below a small article about the property in her blog. You were aware that properly formatted, WordPress can be made to ping dozens of relay services right? Do you see the potential here?

4. List with it!
If you are a real estate professional using Open Realty as your listings manager, you could use the new FREE add-on to present a bookmark link for each and every listing you enter into your site. The add-on is beta tested at this Myrtle Beach Real Estate site. Please note, its a slow site in part because there are modifications being performed to test multiple plugins. This addon is 100% FREE and will be released for download this Friday.

5. Feature listings with it!
You know, we built the original WP Featured to provide bloggers with the ability to feature property listings from their OpenRealty sites within their pages and posts. But what about a Realtor who does not use OpenRealty? Agents are still going to blog, and aside from having to manually enter the property in their blog to feature it, there isn’t really an ideal solution. Until NOW! I’m so happy to be able to tell my real estate clients that there is an affordable solution in hiring us to implement the Dwellicious API into their site so their agents can have blogs and feature listings easily.

How it works is this, if your real estate site has the api implemented already, an agent can setup an account at dwellicious, bookmark his or her listings, use our FREE plugin for their WordPress blog, and feature a user defined number of bookmarked listings. It gets better! The listings can be presented in a unique fashion because the display is template driven.

6. RSS with it! Don’t under estimate it!
Did you know that the dwellicious service provides an ATOM RSS feed link to your profile that you can use to place in news readers, MS Outlook, or other types of RSS rendering tools. Its the core foundation to how we implement it with our two plugins. But you can use it for any number of methods similar to the methods employed by the UltimateIDX. Realtors who maintain news letters and or listings updates will send the links in their standard subscriber service. I’ve said it countless times, if you can bridge the limitations of implementation you will have the worlds best alternative to email marketing because with RSS, you wont be blacklisted as a spammer.

7. Generate Fliers with it!
Look, this is reaching a bit, but I would bet that at some point a person will be able to visit the bookmarked listing on dwellicious and print a PDF flier of the listing complete with comps and possible demographics. If for no other reason than to have it available as a feature of the site. But if this feature surfaces, home seekers could produce a printable version of the listing with maybe your mug shot and contact details at the very top for when they do the drive by view of the property.

Having been in this business for many years I’ve heard the frustrations Realtors tell me about the loss of a sale when home seekers visit a property. What happens? Simple, the home seeker calls the number on the yard sign. Capturing that lead is essential and if you can’t collect it directly by user input, you can get it indirectly by printable flier improving your odds. Read at the end of this post below for a little more thought on this because its not really the focus but hey, I did title the post with the word “possibilities” in it right.

8. Social network with it!
Dwellicious provides ways for you to not only instantly publish a listing to a WordPress blog but share the listing with the top services in use today by the “socially responsible” (plan on words for sure).

9 and 10. Check back
I actually have a 9 and 10 but they require screen shots, so until then.

However some final things to consider. After looking back in time with that perfect 20/20 vision, I believe when social networking services like twitter and facebook among many others are considered, the evidence demonstrating the rampant trend toward social networking literally everything in our lives would seem to guarantee dwellicious a certain degree of potential success. The nice thing about dwellicious in my mind is that its new enough to be bold and based cleanly on what appears to be proven fundamentals for a great social networking and or bookmarking service. My thoughts are that for those who implement it early on could ethically and quite legitimately be considered to be trend setters or at the very least cutting edge. No pun on humor here. But when considering things having been titled cutting edge in the past, growth in popularity and privilege tend to follow those who embrace such things early on. Look at those who originally embraced facebook, myspace and now twitter, rank and fortune are sort of pseudo synonymous with their success.
(FYI, pseudo synonymous meaning not really, or not genuine but having the appearance of synonymous aka falsely synonymous but none the less synonymous. Yeah, its like that!)

Dwellicious WordPress Plugin

Posted on June 1, 2009
Filed Under General | 1 Comment

Hey a quick note, we have a new FREE plugin for WordPress ready to roll. As soon as WordPress approves it I’ll upload it to WordPress and you can display your Dwellicious.com bookmarked listings into a blog post or a featured listings widget. The reason we built this is simple. Agents and Realtors are using blogs to market real estate listings more so than any other website solution. As new services like dwellicious surface it becomes most beneficial for blog owners to take advantage of them and this plugin helps do that.

The Dwellicious bookmarking feature will also be (optionally) included as a feature in our next WordPress Agent Theme release. In the new theme we have already laid out the new foundation for an extensible package built specifically for marketing properties by creating a quick way to publish listings as you post. An agent will have the option of adding listings details to be displayed in a template driven, user configurable listings wrapper for the presentation of his or her listings in the worlds most powerful blog / website solution.

As with all of our plug-ins and add-ons, they are 100% FREE. Please check back for a link to the plug-in on WordPress once approved for inclusion. The new plugin is called WP Dwellicious.


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