WP Featured Listings Plugin Download

Posted on April 30, 2008
Filed Under Real Estate Websites | Leave a Comment

Quick post for you to download the featured listings plugin. Select the link below under "Assorted Featured" bottom right to visit the download page or simply click http://www.jaredritchey.com/featured-listings-plugin

Why you should check back in the next few days!

Adding video tutorials on how to use the plugin
I’ve setup a forum which will be skinned to look like my main blog when I reskin it. http://www.jaredritchey.com/forum/
New updates to the plugin will have been tested and added
New templates for layouts will have been added
The details and instructions page will be complete
More on the way.

I’ll be posting future updates to this product in the forums and on the product landing page for each plugin.

General Dynamics Itronix Laptop Software Drivers

Posted on March 16, 2008
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IX250 IX260 and IX260+ (plux) Drivers

Here is a collection of all drivers for these laptops that I’ve once again updated after digging them out of the archive directory.

I get a lot of emails and traffic to the original post regarding the laptop drivers I had assembled. After spending a great deal of time locating them, I packaged them up in to a single download which I’ve updated again today.

Back when I purchased a handful of these laptops on ebay I discovered that none of them came with driver software which made the task daunting to get an OS loaded.

These machines are not top of the line in CPU and memory speed but I can’t suggest a better more affordable or durable computer to toss in your truck to go camping or fishing or even for use in service vehicles for lawn care, construction, security services, or anything where you need mobile computing. The mere fact that these computers can connect to a standard Motorola 9211 radio makes them ideal for contractors that want to use them for GPS mapping among other things.

Next on my list is a pair of vehicle mounts and a pair internal radio updates. To visit the updated collection of software drivers please visit the Downloads Area

WordPress Featured Listings Scenario

Posted on March 14, 2008
Filed Under Products, Real Estate News, Real Estate Websites | Leave a Comment

Featured Real Estate Listings for SEO advantages

Lets look at a scenario for building SEF and SEO presentable content for your blog with real estate listings. In the previous post I outlined some of the basic issues we encountered with the beta versions and then went on to briefly explain some of those changes for this version 1.2.1 release. One way to articulate the details for those changes would be to simply present a scenario for better understanding of why this method is so very important and beneficial. First lets do a little history about writing effective real estate blog marketing posts, and then examine the scenario

Marketing Real Estate Listings With Your Blog - Search Engine strategy proven to work.

One thing I’ve been telling many of my Realtor clients is that when using a blog, should they discover that they have little time to contribute to the blog on a regular bases, they could consider extending an opportunity to their clients to write content for them. How and why you might ask? The reasons and benefits may surprise you.

Back in October 2006 when I began using WordPress regularly on Realtor sites, I came up with the notion that no one really knows their home better than the owner of the home (as most agree) and the home owner would be better positioned for writing informative content. MLS and many times website inclusion of an mls type feed present very little useful information to a prospective buyer as much of it is rote bland summary points. As such I came up with a solution that we decided to test out on a few real estate sites. As said, mls data can be rote, boring and mundane and it stood to reason that if a Realtor could present better information about a property he / she would be in a better position to sell that property. Right?

So by extending an opportunity to home owners to write detailed information about their homes and provide photos, among other things, a Realtor could publish valuable details to their blogs therein providing a link back to the listing details for that property in a way that better markets the property. Hence one of the motivating factors in building the WordPress Featured Listings plug-in.

Since testing this idea over the span of just over a year now, we discovered that everyone who employs this method reports back extremely favorable results. Some devices being employed in addition to the home owner’s submitted content is the inclusion of things like charts and or maintenance schedules that have been logged over time by the home owner which can include remodel expenses, roofing, lawn care, patching the driveway and other things readers would be interested in. I know that if I were shopping for a home, I’d be interested in knowing how often someone had performed home owner maintenance and I’m sure others would be too when shopping for a home. A blog presents a way to achieve this with home owner submitted content. As most of my Realtor clients use a format schedule I assembled for them, they can set the criteria of the types of things a home owner can or should cover in describing their home. More on this later in the post but for now, just keep the premise in mind as we look at this scenario.

Marking My Featured Real Estate Listing (scenario)

New listing by Realtor: Some Luxury Home In Some Town, Some State
Following a common standard operating procedure the Realtor tasks his staff to add the listing to the local MLS, orders a yard sign, and sets about adding the property to their prescribed marketing efforts (website, printed magazines, news paper and other rag sheets etc…)

The Realtor decides that he is way to busy to write a blog post about the property and may opt instead to task an employee to write the post following some checklists and procedures for writing such content or the Realtor may outsource the content writing to a copywriter. All said and done, the copy complete, property listed, now time will tell how effective those efforts are. But, why leave it at that?

This same Realtor is an educated Realtor with lots of marketing and psychology studies in his background so this Realtor knows that a more personable and heart felt the informative description is in the blogs copy, the longer a person will stay on the site and the more likely they contact the Realtor would be. But who is to write about this property in such a way and wouldn’t it cost a great deal to have it professionally written with all the checks and balances of keyword density and link relevance? This two part questions is one we can answer in two sentences.

The Realtor extends the opportunity to his client home owner to share as much detail as their heart desires and they can include video tours, photos and other media elements to be published on the world wide web. Next the Realtor visits a site like The Brokers Edge and uses the online tools for checking the material for link relevance, keyword density, and other facets prior to publishing, which the Realtor does by using a pre-formatted method like the one included in our Professional WP Editor Plug-in. Now the post is ready for the next step.

The Realtor uses the WordPress Featured Listings plug-in and includes a single instance of this particular properties listing that rotates random images from those available with each refresh of the page. Then the Realtor adds a second featured listing inclusion using the WordPress Featured Listings plug-in showing an additional 3, 5, or say 10 listings from that very neighborhood which he / she includes just below the blog post. Do you see where I’m going with this?

Who stands to know more, write more and inform more about a particular home than a home owner? Who can write how they "feel" about their home, the neighborhood, the schools, and other facets of a home so effectively? Any Realtor would be hard pressed to provide such information in a cost effective way and even more hard pressed to justify such an expense of conducting research the home owner already knows. write from their perspective for inclusion into the Real Estate blog for greater potential ranking and buyer interaction.

Now you might just say why not include hard coded links in the post to the listings details from photos you add to the post? Why use the Featured Listings WordPress plug-in for such a mundane task.? The answer is simple. Speed and flexibility. With this plug-in we have been able to create custom variants for clients that allow them to use it with products like the UltimateIDX, IDX Web Pro, vieleRETS and others. It has been recently tested with not only Open Realty 2.4.4 but the variant version called EZ Pro Realty and we have plans to port a version to EZRealty for Joomla this next week.

Please read the latest posts on this today.

WordPress Post Planner Plugin

Posted on March 10, 2008
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Effective content planning for your WordPress blog.

Some time ago I had a friend write me a small PHP application of sorts that was used to assist in the assembly of well structured written content following the 5 paragraph narrative format of a thesis writing project. Having built the mini-app for one of my classes, the idea behind the tool was based almost entirely on the process of good writing. Taking from the influence of the Scott Forshmans English Writing Handbook, the mini-app was essentially a collection of RTF generators where fields were filled in depending on the format chosen.

Now, you may have seen or even used content generators in Microsoft Word or other popular document publishing solutions, but none seemed to exist for the web and certainly none seemed to exist for blogging. If a blogger could publish content based on pre-formed and well structured writing formats, the expected quality of the content should increase right?

Well, after looking at all the old documents I had on writing styles and processes taught in grammar schools and English classes, I came up with an idea to make many of these "rote format" methods of writing a tool for bloggers by building a WordPress plugin to assist in the writing process. Although many professional bloggers tend to use offline tools for drafting content, many I’ve spoken with said that the tools for truly professional writing and editing are not available in most blogging solutions although they wish such tools were. So, I ran the idea by my coder in order to take that mini application and turn it into yet another FREE Plugin for WordPress that will help bloggers write better content, online.

Writing Better Content! WordPress blogging 101

What this next plugin will feature basically centers around the process of writing and the management of resources specific to writing using formats often found in good research writing taught in schools and colleges. So here is a brief summary of what is currently in this plugin and what is pending prior to release. Again, this plugin is being released as a FREE plugin for WordPress.

POST PLANNER PLUGIN FEATURES

When you sit down to write, how do you approach a writing project? For me it always begins with the idea of what the subject should be about and then I write down a clear statement of who the target audience is before I begin to write (in most cases that is). With my audience in mind and an idea of their expectations I write according to those expectations presenting to them my ideas and thoughts related to the subject I write. I may start out with a thesis statement of sorts and certainly an introduction that may either fully set the expectation of the content or I’ll shoot from the hip and use a technique in writing I learned where you take a person one direction only to arrive at another. A common technique in politics you may have noticed.

So what this plugin seeks to do is simple, it seeks to provide you a way to write content based on optional structure and methods of writing while providing essential tools for writing good content.

More than just a collection of available pre formatted fields to fill in, this plugin will feature some basic file management and even analytical tools for testing keyword density and other SEO important things prior to publishing your post or page. Now in the test I have been able to get the keyword analyzer to work rather quickly, but some of the features of the plugin are going to clearly require a person well versed in AJAX and mootools which I’m actively seeking now.

Mark, my programmer, has also assisted me in the creation of the admin interface which will feature a modified version of the FCK editor along with some drop down user defined preselects for rapid publishing of content. With the plugin a writer will be able to organize notes, organize resources, gather files and other media elements, prior to the writing stage. Getting the ducks all in a row as the cliche goes makes the writing process much easier. Now its a lofty goal naturally for some features I have planned but my sincere objective is to make this plugin worthy of serious use by any professional writer or journalist by providing features many in such a line of work would require.

Does this replace the standard POST editor page? In part, yes especially with the addition of some new fields and the customized editor.

I’ll get you a screen shot later today of what we have already come up with.

Product Downloads Page Update!

Posted on March 10, 2008
Filed Under Real Estate Websites | 2 Comments

WordPress Real Estate Plugin, also released

I’m updating the downloads page for many of the items that were blocked later today so please check back. The Featured Listings WordPress plugin and other plugins are available now so please feel free to drop me a line regarding features ideas, bugs and general feedback as I’m already planning the next release of this plugin.

Also, I’ve added a few templates for Open Realty and a variant for the new pending fork release titled "EZ Pro Realty". Since template compatibility isn’t 100% due in part to several modifications to the core, I’ve ported some of the older Open Realty templates in my inventory to work with the new "pathfinder" release of EZ Pro Realty.

Page Peel Open Ads Now Available

Posted on February 26, 2008
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Flash Page Peel Effect with Open Ads Advertisements

Well it took me longer than I wanted but the page peel effect now works with Open Ads in rendering the advertisements. I’ll have this packaged up by morning with reworked documentation and added to the product list for those interested in using it.

No major changes from the past version this version does require you to have the latest OpenAds from OpenAds.org and requires you to plublish ads using the using the JavaScript method. More on this later when I get it packaged up.

UPDATED FEB 27th 9:14 AM || SMALL UPDATE REQUIRED

While my coder was fixing the Featured Listings Anywhere code to include animated featured listing display he spent a great deal more time cleaning up the config.php file for me and as such the Page Peel Open Ads tool is going to be a day late. I’m sincerely sorry for the delay but such events dictate our schedule.

Page Curl Effect - Open Ads

Posted on February 23, 2008
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Page Flip and Page Curl Updates - Open Ads

Some time ago I purchased the resell rights to a product called Page Flip which we have since modified extensively. I made the post here http://www.jaredritchey.com/flash-pagepeel-pageturn-effect.html originally. Well after receiving the update changes to Open Ads It appears that the page curl snippet breaks. So I’m going to have my coder revamp that this weekend.

Previously this tool worked just fine with Open Ads and the guide that was included showed how to make it show up on select pages in your WordPress blog by using the custom fields feature and a snippet of PHP. Well as it stands if you update your Open Ads your page curl will simply not work if you are generating ads from it.

I’ll try and get an update published tomorrow if I can get my coder to finish today. Please remember, that if you purchased the existing version you will receive a FREE update once the code is completed. Same is true of any purchases on any of my plug-ins that are commercial.

WordPress Realty Plug-in Branding

Posted on February 23, 2008
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WordPress Real Estate Listings Plug-in UNBRANDED - Private Label

Its strange, all the feedback I get regarding the BETA version of my plug-in, only a half dozen responded regarding the testing details and yet none have responded or suggested regarding fixes that may be needed. I thought I’d answer a few questions received in emails since the first of February where people have asked for this plug-in in hopes of getting more user questions related to this plug-in.

Is it branded and are their links off site?

SEO conscious as people and developers have become this was planned for long in advance of that very question. Because I too believe its nonsense for a plug-in developer to provide off site links where relevance isn’t present, I made the decision up front that NO off site links or branding will be used in my plug-ins.

Are Plug-in developers hindering your search engine ranking success?

I have had the same issue with plug-ins being off site linked and branded. Goolge and other SE’s do care where you link to and those links matter in terms of relevance. If I had put a link in my plug-in on your site, you would end up writing a post about a particular property listing where you then display a featured listings for that property class only to have your efforts penalized by a link to my site which is completely out of context to your post.

Some developers publish plug-ins with branded off-site links either not knowing the significance of their actions or deliberately indifferent to them. Most courses of action have been to simply remove the links but that poses a serious issue as well. Removing or altering the links to have a no-follow may violate release terms even if it isn’t a violation of the GNU / GPL or Creative Commons license. Plug-in developers often give away their works in hopes that traffic will lead to contracts and future sales which is certainly a valid and honest motive but the method used can be counter productive as well. There is however a small minority of developers so wrapped up in their ego that branding everything from the style sheets the naming conventions of files to reflect their bold self bolstering intention. Such is life. Some do however provide solutions by offering a commercial license for next to nothing in price which leads me to my next plug-in publishing method.

Private Label and Private Branding for commercial use

Redistribution is already granted under the GNU / GPL license as Open Source as most may know. The same rules apply to many plug-ins and that is; give credit where credit is do and keep the source code open even if you add to the plug-in among other familiar directive. Seems simple right?

Private label options can be discussed but I’ve not put much thought into this beyond what people have asked for. Some have asked for a version they can distribute that would be geared toward automotive or yacht sites that use Open Realty as the listing tool and WordPress as the CMS or main site blog.

I must concede and agree that many sites would require modification to the plug-in and their featured listings templates in such a way that they would not appear as real estate related. Quoting by permission, two of the beta testers asked;

Jared, is there a way to modify the titles and rendering parameters for city, state and… (she goes on to say) I have a pet store that uses the Instinct e-commerce plugin and I want to write posts about different breeds of cats and dogs and have the featured Animals show up according to different criteria when I write posts to help market pets we have for adoption better.

Beta tester two states;

I build automotive and yacht sites in the bay area for things like exotic car rentals and yacht rentals and want to see about a version for the car and yacht business. Your templates and wording relate to real estate which wont work for our needs. Can you make those things variables so we can select what titles show? (added note by me) This person uses the plug-in as it was intended to be used. To market listings for whatever you plan on featuring by writing blog posts about the product then providing a randomizing featured "display" according to some criteria.

In these examples its easy to see that I should keep in mind that people other than Realtors (my intended target audience) will want to use this plug-in. So as a result I’m going to see about having my coder look at making the variables for the search order according to user parameters. Basically you the user will determine the fields to be used by entering them based on their name in the Open Realty database. So for instance if you want to display Featured Anything by a criteria such as "Dog Breed" as opposed to "City" then this will be made possible. Some things fundamental to the function of this plug-in however will remain unchanged. The "Class" and "AgentID" will remain the same even if "AgentID" is renamed.

Commercial Products going FREE!

Posted on February 17, 2008
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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.

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.

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