Free OpenRealty PDF Brochure Released

Posted on July 19, 2009
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We patched this for free distro today so please feel free to test it and if you find a bug I’ll fix it. This was once part of a collection of tools used in some of our client sites which was primarily used to generate a list format for rental properties. We had built it because some of our clients wanted to charge $9.95 a month for people registered to their OpenRealty sites for the download of current rental property lists. The PayPal feature has been removed and we reduced it down to a nice little brochure pdf output feature.

Installation is pretty easy, simply upload the folder /pdf/ to your addons folder, ie /addons/pdf/ then create a folder in the root directory of your OpenRealty install as /brochures/ and be sure to set the permissions as 755. Last drop in the template tag into your listing details or search results templates according to the README-NOTES.txt file.

How the PDF is generated is based entirely on the printer_friendly.html file in your OpenRealty template. In the next release these printer_friendly.html’s will be in the addons template folder since there will be a multi assignment feature. Why bother with a PDF if the OpenRealty printer_friendly.html does a nice job? The answer is this, for individual users that may suffice, but in order to email a brochure or maybe link to a brochure in your blog, a PDF is the ideal. So we created this to auto create a property brochure. I have a few things planned for the next release as follows;

I’m going to add in predefined template features based on class so you can have different brochure types per property class. Core is ready, just haven’t had time to finish.
I’m going to implement the feature that would allow a person to print things like Rental lists, or featured listings lists. I have a version that does this for a Florida Realtor but it currently requires some other custom template settings that would be too much to outline herein for now.
Documentation naturally. I’m way behind on this in pretty much all my add-ons and plug-ins.
My favorite feature will be the ability to have a list of existing PDFs in the /brochures/ folder be automatically generated and possibly assigned to other pages where they could be used for other purposes. I was thinking that since the PDFs are saved to the /brochures/ folder they could be of use for linking in maybe a WordPress article or something. Have to give it some more thought later I guess.
I may opt to make the PDF link a No Follow; I’ve been getting information from various people that say Google can in fact read a PDF file and it could show up as duplicate content. Not sure if that’s true but should anyone feel it is, I’ll implement it.
As part of the custom templates, I’ll have it so that an agents photo can be displayed based on the listingID so large companies can personalize their brochures.

2 More FREE Addons Released

Posted on July 13, 2009
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Only a moment to introduce this post, I’ve released the WP Dwellicious on WordPress for download, once approved you can download it there and the OpenRealty Dwellicious. Each of these essentially have functionality for placing either bookmarking links in your listings details pages or displaying Dwellicious content in your blog. Each is free, each is new and each is un-branded. You may have noticed I’ve been working on my downloads area, well that is where the OpenRealty add-ons will be.

I need to pack up the OpenRealty one with a little documentation but its actually super easy to use. One tag is all that is required for making it work. Once in your listings details page, people can “social bookmark” your listings. With the WP Dwellicious, agents or mortgage people or anyone for that matter can subscribe to a dwellicious feed and display a specified number in either a blog post or page. A sort of quick and easy “Featured Listings” per se. An example of a dwellicious bookmark page would be like http://dwellicious.com/jaredritcheyj. Anyway back to work.

Itronix IX250 – IX260 Rugged Laptop Software Drivers

Posted on July 12, 2009
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Itronix Laptop Software Downloads Have Been Updated!

Itronix IX260 Atlantic Computing posted a whole slew of the Itronix IX250 and IX260 rugged laptops on ebay a month ago and they have been selling a spank load of them. I’ve followed a few of the auctions and it looks like some people are grabbing these for about $300 on average, most of which are in like-new condition. These were announced as lease turn-ins from General Dynamics in Spokane Washington. As a result of so many being offered, I’ve had some pretty active downloads in the last two weeks even though, on occasion some have encountered download issues with the larger files. What I’ve done is broken the downloads into smaller parts for those with slower connections to the files.

Who uses the Itronix IX250 and IX260 Laptops?

Who uses these semi-outdated Itronix Rugged Tough Books and why bother? The simple answer is price. New they run for about $3,500 but with so many lease returns the availability of tough rugged computing is very affordable. These little tough books are military tested and are still in use by many divisions of the Armed Forces as well as law enforcement agencies around the nation. But its not just the police and military that buys and uses these Itronix Rugged Laptops; its city offices, the water department, the utilities companies, cable companies, corporations, sattalite dish technicians, delivery services, security companies and more.

Anyway, I’ve updated the software and documentation download with the following..

Available Software and Documentation

For more reading about the Itronix Laptops I have these previous articles; Itronix Software Drivers Itronix Laptop Update and the Itronix IX-250 and IX-260 GPS.

OpenRealty Fork Suspended

Posted on July 12, 2009
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Contributing to OpenRealty

Keeping up with consistency and compatibility has pretty much tanked the maintenance of the Fork of OpenRealty. What we will likely be doing is contacting Paul Bouchard or Ryan Bonham asking if they would be willing to accept our contributions to their project at OpenRealty. Ryan suggests that he would allow code contributions in a post he had written in my honor, or so I like to call it. If in fact Ryan will accept our code contributions, we would be happy to share.

For now, I’ll maintain a core mod version of OpenRealty for projects and downloads for anyone desiring such. Naturally the license and credits by Transparent Tech would stay in tact and certainly unchanged as its not my desire to try and compete with OpenRealty for their own product. We have always wanted to contribute code but have been denied, which is one of the motivating factors for the birth of our fork to begin with. Now, with me moving back to full time teaching at the college and my workload being broken down into a more specialized market I simply can’t maintain a fork.

In the core mod version I will include a folder for /original-files/ for consistency and then in the core mod files I’ll simply put comments where the modifications have taken place for those curious what we have changed. You can naturally verify the changes by grabbing a copy of WinMerge free of charge to examine the code. The changes will be commented as;

//////////////////////////////////////// DocID 21
// Begin (or End) CORE-MOD 07-09-09
// Inclusion of multi image folder feature
//////////////////////////////////////////////////

I’ll try and get this loaded in the first part of the week. I have projects and updates to our plugins taking place as a priority however but I can package up on request.

PHP Form Mailer With DataBase Support

Posted on July 10, 2009
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You know after having googled for an entire afternoon, I was unable to find a single opensource php form mailer script that would save form data to a MySQL database. Granted there are dozens of scripts that are super close but none that are quite the drop in and go easy to modify type I was seeking. Having need for this for many specialized situations over the years, my partner and I decided its time to build one as a GNU/GPL product that can easily be implemented into products like OpenRealty and WordPress or other types of products without the need for an add-on or plug-in of sorts. So, I now call this new freebie the PHP FormKit.

The PHP FormKit uses the PHPMailer Class, some AJAX, a MySQL Database, Session Token for anti spam, a little jQuery form validation and some basic documentation. Naturally as with all the plug-ins and add-ons we publish, this will be GNU/GPL and 100% free of charge. I have a few tiny bugs to work out and a few custom HTML styled templates to add for things like “Email a friend” or “Send me a copy” that will deliver a nice styled HTML email all of which is template based. Can you imagine adding this to your real estate website wherein someone selects “send to a friend” and they get a nice email with your logo, maybe your mug shot and a few featured listings. Yeah its that cool and you are free to style as you please, create forms as you please, no limitations as to appearance other than your own mind.

I’ll show you a quick (sort of old) example I have from a previous OpenRealty add-on we built about a year ago. First a little background on this because it helps articulate what we are doing in this project. The add-on was designed so that when the agents were added to the OR Database they could log in and select from an inventory of about 20 or so pre designed HTML templates that would simply provide a nice templated look to some basic correspondence features in the add-on. After the agent chose the template of their liking, any emails sent to visitors or those who query about a property would receive an HTML email with the agents photo, maybe a few featured listings and then the standard details already present in the OpenRealty database. Its a much nicer way to send emails in my personal opinion. The nice thing was that it worked with Yahoo, GMail and others that are notorious for stripping styles and other elements from HTML emails. I posted a single example of the type of HTML you could for example use. Its NOT beautiful, but it gives you an idea. http://www.jaredritchey.com/projects/formkitp/ I’m off to the races so to speak, with lots and lots of work to do but I’ll get this posted here shortly for download.

WP Menu Creator Widget

Posted on July 10, 2009
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Quick note and semi quick announcement about an update being added to the Menu Creator for WordPress. We are going to wigetize it for easier implementation. Lots of people using the Menu Creator love it a great deal but struggle with the inclusion of the menu into their themes. We really wanted to keep the tool flexible for theme development so the PHP tag method served its purpose. Now that people are using more and more top end themes, including those that are commercial, widgets seems to be a logical enhancement for our next release.

What about CSS? I’ve struggled with the idea for a while now regarding this feature request and have really no firm idea as to how to approach the feature. When the Menu Creator was built we knew that we wanted it to simply generate output as clean and XHTML compliant as we could. Clients and end users of the Menu Creator are frequently frustrated with how to move to the next step in styling the menus. Our solution for now is a snippet bank of example code and tutorials yet to be published on UIDX. I think in future releases I’ll add in an option where a small inventory of example menu styles can be selected by a drop down list. It will be a bit lofty to include that feature so I’ll reserve the development priority to the multi lingual features and integration of OpenCube output as the priority for now. Below is a quick little snap-shot of the widget.

Link Credits and Site Wide Footer Links

Posted on July 9, 2009
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Are site wide webmaster links necessary or even beneficial?

I was talking with one of my clients recently about the importance of avoiding site wide links that lead to external locations when he had asked me why he could not find any sites on the web with links back to me from client templates after being in this business for about 9 years. The question at first didn’t really register with me as to why it would even matter but I gave him the very to-the-point answer that I don’t retain credits for 90% of my projects primarily because of who my clients are. In all the sites I build even for UltimateIDX or EZProRealty, their policy is to put site credit links pointing first inward to an article about the site and then from the article they will link to their sites as a form of contextual linking. The idea is as clear as a bell to me as to the motive why this should be done, but some people still wonder why having site wide designer links is even necessary. During the development of the UltimateIDX’s template inventory it was #1 on the list that site wide links would likely not be the objective in lieu of the heightened awareness that such links are not SEO beneficial. I’ll explain the conclusion we arrived to below.

Webmasters who publish free themes, templates and the like frequently put link-back links as the requirement for using the design. Most webmasters who do this try to put their best effort forward raising not only the standards but the expectation of what good theme and template design should be (theme and template are terms often interchangable). Many end users using the themes are happy with the arrangement in favor of using the design on their sites. It should be clear that that if a designer puts forth a design that is say, worth a thousand dollars in terms of time and development, that he/she should reap some reward for publishing it not only as an advertisement of their design ability but as type of pseudo payment. Keep the payment part in mind becaue it plays a roll. In simple terms it means, "you can use my expensive template freely providing you leave the design credits and link un-altered". Now although the point is a valid one and it really is the designers right to ask for the use license compliance to his request, many still question the overall effect on the sites ranking ability in part due to the site wide external link. There are newer alternatives being explored.

Our approach to the link-backs

To better demonstrate the characteristic of template link-backs I’ll disclose my own policy and then explain what UltimateIDX and others like them have been doing even with the distribution of free templates. Even though I’m not technically in the business of freelance web design on its surface I do take on private projects for individual websites and in most cases I don’t bother with a link-back in the footer. I do this as a business decision for a few reasons which include the fact that I don’t maintain a plublically viewable portfolio. The reasons are simple, I don’t use Jared Ritchey Design as my primary site for business even though I do some freelance work on a personal level as a result. So its not my objective to rank for anything beyond the things I desire to blog about. That includes design. When I apply my new template to this blog, I wont be adding the "Design" part to the site name any further. It will just be the blog of "Jared Ritchey" the unusually usual opinionated designer type dude, or whatever. I started out in this business working for other firms and today, many years later, I’m still in the same business. I rarely do work for individual companies or website owners as most are publishers of templates or other products that they simply outsource to me. I’m a kind-of freelancer’s freelancer for lack of a better definition. A good majority of my clients are those who are webmasters, developers and third party vendors that outsource template design work or MLS integration with OpenRealty or WordPress or even Joomla which is my self proclaimed specialty. It should be obvious then that I really can’t expect some design firm outsourcing an OpenRealty template to me to allow my footer links in the final product. Nor could I ask a template club or hosting company that contracts me for 10, 15, 20 templates they plan on distributing to give me some sort of credit either. I’m in a unique business with little or no competition. I really don’t compete with designers and design firms or other types of real estate webmasters because of the nature of my business so the links are of little use to me. The UltimateIDX and others may approach the link-backs with the same caution even though the benefit of it is certainly coveted and expected to some degree. But they do it "differently"! I say "caution" in their respect only because they understand that it can be a detriment to a site that harbors site wide external links.

The methods being employed today by our team for UIDX is that we distribute free templates wherein the primary main page or home page template php-file has a design credit link-back by default and a no-follow link back upon request. What we had then done was changed this in the subsequent templates like the page.php or single.php as in the case of WordPress. Those links were certainly be external linksbacks as they are internal pages or internal to the sites as it were. There had been times we expirimented with making each of these links different depending on page or post and the results were simply no difference good or bad in all our tests. What the UltimateIDX had concluded after numerous sites was that they will no longer attempt to distribute alternative links in the individual template files and opt instead for a standard industry practice of just including a regular design credit link-back in the footer. It gets a little more creative as an offer is extended in the template use license to allow the removal of the site wide external providing an article about the template or some other interesting aspect is referred to in a dedicated post. Naturally the link would be required to be added linking back to their site. Its a fine line really if you think about it. The SERPS do not want any type of mechanical manipulation of links which this would not be, but they also do not want paid links which are certainly a dangerous practice. Could the license use option be considered a paid link of sorts? I said above that it is a type of pseudo payment or compensation for use of the theme but at this point I doubt it as such as its not technically a paid feature. This in addition to to the fact that there really doesn’t appear to be a way to abuse it. It certainly solves the "turn-key or boiler-plate" issue many SEO types believe is an issue for the site owner. I’ll place my money on this option being used by UIDX for free templates any day over other methods. In our newest releases all templates now have a new extensible tabbed options panel that includes footer link alternatives and one such being coded now is an option to point the link to an internal page, leave it as is, or remove it after submitting a donation to compensate for the development time. I’m eager for feedback on this practice as its not discussed nearly enough. For now I’ll leave the SEO stuff to the SEO’s and they can weigh in.

WordPress Form Creator

Posted on July 9, 2009
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UltimateIDX WP Form Creator Plug-in

UltimateIDX is wrapping up the final edits in their newest WordPress plug-in titled WP Form Creator. The plug-in has been in development for quite some time with countless revisions and modifications to make the process of creating forms for WordPress bloggers a snap. As developers of real estate websites, the UltimateIDX has encountered its fair share of frustrations from blog owners that struggle with the inclusion of forms in their pages and posts. Although there are dozens of options out there many of which are exceptional in design and features, the challenge has been keeping the rendered form fully XHTML compliant. Naturally the motive is to ensure its implementation by blog developers and other professionals who demand compliant standard websites.

During the development it became evident that in order to achieve full XHTML compliance there would need to be some way to include user defined HTML markup. The option or need in many instances for using user defined markup would return us right back to what we had hoped to avoid, a complex plug-in. Most bloggers are not coders nor do they wish to use HTML markup but in order to make it fully design flexible we opted include the feature allowing designers and coders a great deal of flexibility in controlling the generated output.

After publishing the WP Menu Creator we had learned many many lessons which we would apply to all future plug-ins beginning with the need to keep it as flexible yet as powerful as we possibly could without crossing the line to making it exclusively a developers plug-in. The Menu Creator has certainly been perceived as such for the most part because we didn’t include any actual menu CSS markup. As mentioned in previous posts, the motive behind this was our concern that users of the Menu Creator would draw conclusion that it was limited to only those CSS Menu examples we had included with the plug-in. The WP Form Creator, like the WP Menu Creator are both too flexible by design to articulate their capabilities for designers by including a few snippets or layouts. For this reason, again, the UltimateIDX has contracted a studio to produce a few instructional tutorials to help jump start any blogger in using the plug-in quickly and effectively without a great deal of effort.

The process of creating the forms took a few code examples from the Menu Creator by using some jQuery drag and drop features that make it as user friendly as we could. UltimateIDX still has the plug-in as a beta product but in all the tests we had done over the past weeks have proven quite successful as we test and tweak time and time again to generate the absolute cleanest XHTML compliant code designers and users are certain to demand. When creating forms; you simply drag the form elements to the layout window, set the parameters for each form element, and add any custom markup you desire (including images) and you’re ready to publish. The UltimateIDX will be releasing the first version as 1.0 but should be considered BETA at this point. So, what I did was quickly knocked out a fast (not to pretty) video preview of the plug-in which you may find of interest. Although this version is loaded with some pretty common jQuery stuff, the final product will look a little different than what you will see in this video. http://www.jaredritchey.com/tutorials/WPFormCreator/

Hosting Nightmares

Posted on July 8, 2009
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Real Estate Website Hosting

There are people that believe all things happen for a reason and a purpose and in a lot of ways I’m actually hoping that is true. In the last two weeks, I’ve encountered more than my monthly share of clients and bloggers frustrated with the reality of the domain hosting world. Its not at all uncommon in the Real Estate web site business since that type of hosting is a different animal all together. However, when e-commerce sites start to tank, I’m grateful that I have always had a backup as I soon discovered recently. Granted, many commercial shared hosting companies deliver excessively on their promise to provide unlimited everything for next to nothing but not all projects can benefit from such offers. Ten bucks a month is no money at all to host a blog or OpenRealty or even a Joomla site anymore but what happens when the hosts server configuration wont meet the minimum requirements?

Although I have a full length article in revision that addresses many of the issues associated to hosting e-commerce and real estate type websites, I wanted to drop in and make brief note on this subject because of recent events that leave people so frustrated. The simple fact is, not all hosting is alike and not all hosting will fit the bill for all types of projects. With regard to real estate websites especially being of a special class all of their own, its not uncommon to see people investing in a commercial hosting account only to realize that it doesn’t work. But why doesn’t it work?

In order to answer why it doesn’t work in any great detail goes beyond my desire to post right now. A summary of reasons however would begin with what is required for an MLS empowered site or even an e-commerce site. Since both types of sites deal with large database queries, large image inventories for the gallery of products they represent and the need for some types of CRON automated script features, many hosting companies can not accommodate. The end result can cost in terms of delays and even loss of business if these things are not accounted for.

Hosting by and large is a numbers game. You turn out an offer for unlimited bandwidth, unlimited space, unlimited emails for an excellent price. Hosting companies know that very few customers will ever use unlimited anything so the selling point is moot for a blogger or anyone not using resource intense features in their sites. This however doesn’t stop people from trying to host MLS empowered real estate sites which most often results in scripts and or searches crashing. The reason behind this most often ends up being one of three issues. Not exclusively these three issues but more often than not. Here they are in brief.

The first is max_execution_time.

Running an MLS update that involves say a few hundred listings isn’t likely going to encounter this but when you start processing several thousand listings and the image download via RETS or another type of IDX inclusion the max_execution_time will most certainly need to be set high enough to accommodate this. Most commercial shared hosting service providers have this set at 30 to 60 and are usually not willing to raise this. In my own projects I like to have room for mistakes and slow RETS connections that can surface from time to time so on my own servers I’ll either set this to zero or 300

The next is fOpen and URL Includes.

Both of these are a valid security concern and hosting companies usually demand that you re-script accordingly or you suffer having the need for either. With real estate websites its not uncommon to need some sort of URL include for things like featured listings in your blog or maybe fopen to download MLS updates in zip or tar.gz format. I can’t count how many times I’ve encountered a situation where our normal download scripts fail to run on many servers.

Another is peak bandwidth and bandwidth throttling.

Part of the hosting game is to pack as many hosting clients as you realistically can on a server in order to justify that 24/7 support with all those exceptional unlimited everything features. The problem with that is the potential to bottle neck the connection and although load balancing and other things can be implemented to solve most of that, a good majority of IT professionals working for these hosting companies opt for some sort of bandwidth throttling. Bandwidth throttling will limit (“throttle”) the quantity of data it transmits and/or accepts within a specified period of time. This can cause some issues beginning with slow site response and time outs for larger commerce or real estate sites. Now its important to note that this isn’t usually associated to DB queries but can none the less include them. If you have several thousand listings and you are a good webmaster and you do the normal updates and exports to Google, Yahoo, MSN and the like. You will receive a spank of traffic for indexing alone and this can tank many sites to the point they become non-responsive. I’ve seen it happen all to often and it has always been revealed to us as being the web hosts safety net, bandwidth throttling.

I have a full well researched detail oriented post about hosting for real estate sites being revised and edited for a future post. If you stay tuned I’ll be updating my blogs nasty little layout to the new design and will be adding such articles to a category that addresses real estate sites exclusively.