I’m usually not awake when I post at this hour, but I am today.
I built a new widget last night that will link to each new Odysseus Medal nominee as it comes in. This is something I’ve been planning to do for a while, but I took care of it last night in response to a goad from Drew Meyers at Zillow.
You can find it live in the sidebar to the right, but this is what the little toy looks like:
Each new nominee will be reflected in this list, posting blog-style, most recent nominee on top. I’ll have to moderate the entries for spam and porn, but I’ve built tools to enable me to amend the list by means of clickable links from my email — the power of PHP. This week’s list is semi-sorta randomized, because I didn’t have the standing nominations sorted by their date and time of entry.
What Drew was interested in is something like TechMeme for the RE.net. I don’t think we’re big enough to justify something like that, or for it to make much sense even if someone were to do it. But the Long List of Odysseus Medal nominees is already a fairly comprehensive list of important posts in real estate weblogging. The Short List is selected by me, but the Long List is inherently democratic: Anyone can nominate anything. This widget will provide an added incentive to nominate good posts.
The widget itself is not complicated, and I built it to be shared. It’s designed to work flexibly in your sidebar without clashing with your look and feel. In other words, it should take on the characteristics of your Cascading Style Sheet, not mine. If you want to deploy the widget, it’s dread simple. Copy this line of code:
<?php
include ("https://bloodhoundrealty.com/BloodhoundBlog/TheLongList.php");
?>
and paste it on a line of its own in your “sidebar.php” file for your currently active theme. FTP that into the appropriate folder on your file server and you’re done. (Note: These instructions presume WordPress and an FTP connection. If you know how to deploy this code in another blogging platform, or if you know how to edit theme files from within WordPress, speak up in the comments.)
Let me know if you can get it to break or if it’s not behaving with your style sheet.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing, technology
Krista Baker says:
Hi Greg – I tried installing it on my sidebar (it’s under “Odysseus Medal Nominees”) and I keep getting the message “This website is temporarily unavailable, please try again later.”
Any ideas why that may be? The page seems to be working when I visit it directly.
January 5, 2008 — 8:33 am
Jay Thompson says:
“… if you know how to edit theme files from within WordPress…”
From the WP Dashboard:
Presentation –> Theme Editor –> click file to be edited
I suggest copying/pasting the existing file into an editor and saving so you have a clean copy in case something gets munged.
January 5, 2008 — 9:01 am
Jay Thompson says:
Krista – looking at the source code for your home page, it looks like you put Greg’s code into a widget. If you’re putting into the Text Widget, it can’t process php. There is a widget similar to Text that accepts php code here.
January 5, 2008 — 10:02 am
Greg Swann says:
Krista, Jay: First try the revised code string shown above. I was using the short form of our URL, and apparently this wasn’t resolving. I was able to duplicate Krista’s results, so the new code might fix the problem.
January 5, 2008 — 10:07 am
Krista Baker says:
Greg – that worked and looks great, thanks!
Jay – thanks for the comment, though it is hard coded into my template. It only looks widgetified because I used similar css formatting so it would blend in.
January 5, 2008 — 11:21 am
Greg Swann says:
> Greg – that worked and looks great, thanks!
Excellent. Sorry for my error, but thank you for being the guinea pig.
Krista’s implementation shows the chameleon-like nature of the code. It inherits her look and feel, not BHB’s:
January 5, 2008 — 11:32 am
Jay Thompson says:
Huh. Wonder why the short form (http://BloodhoundBlog.com/TheLongList.php) resolves OK on my blog (when copied into a PHP Exec Widget)?
January 5, 2008 — 4:41 pm
Greg Swann says:
> Wonder why the short form (http://BloodhoundBlog.com/TheLongList.php) resolves OK on my blog (when copied into a PHP Exec Widget)?
A mystery. It looks good at that width.
January 5, 2008 — 6:02 pm
Drew Meyers from Zillow says:
Great work putting this widget together so quickly. While I certainly think your widget is cool, I do still think there is value in a techmeme model for real estate. Yes, the RE.net isn’t as big as the tech blogosphere, but that just means the stream of stories w/in the RE.net won’t move as quickly at Techmeme. If 5 posts listed in your widget are all talking about the same issue & linking to each other, how is the reader supposed to know? Techmeme gives people an quick and easy way to view all the different articles written about a specific issue you’re interested in.
January 6, 2008 — 1:40 pm
Teri Lussier says:
The perfect place for me to post this would be my AR blog. Got any idea how to make that work?
June 29, 2008 — 8:53 am
Greg Swann says:
> The perfect place for me to post this would be my AR blog. Got any idea how to make that work?
Did you try pasting in the PHP the way I have it? Cheryl, any ideas?
June 29, 2008 — 6:48 pm
Teri Lussier says:
I asked CJ in an email, I’ll send her over here so the Queen of Kludge can speak for herself, but here’s what she gave me:
I don’t think the Active Rain system will run PHP — not all sites/hosts allow PHP.
But, a little kludge can work around that. Just run the widget in an iframe (that’ short for “inline frame” and call up the plain old HTML page without the PHP. Here you go:
I had to adjust the width, as the AR sidebar is only 215, and it isn’t perfect, but it’s there.
June 30, 2008 — 4:57 am
Cheryl Johnson says:
Kludge is never quite perfect, by definition 🙂
However, to display code in a WordPress post, one must use Greg’s Proc Me tool
<P ALIGN=center><iframe height=”340″ width=”245″ style=”border:0;” frameborder =”0″ scrolling=”no” src=”https://bloodhoundrealty.com/BloodhoundBlog/TheLongList.php”> </iframe></p>
The link to this tool deserves a permanent book mark
https://bloodhoundrealty.com/BloodhoundBlog/SlashProc.php
June 30, 2008 — 5:07 am