There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Blogging (page 8 of 84)

Speaking in tongues: Revising my universal contact form for real estate weblogs — e-paging support and friendlier coding

About eleven months ago, I built a universal contact form for real estate webloggers. Just lately, I’ve revisited that code to add support for e-paging and other kinds of hyper-brief email-based messaging. Getting a form emailed to the office is a nice thing — unless you’re out previewing or inspecting all day. The new version will find you wherever you are.

The revised contact form will email you your prospect’s contact information (to as many email addresses as you like) and, also, optionally e-page you with a very brief form of the information (again transmitting to as many e-page addresses as you choose).

The e-page will give you the party’s name, email address and phone number (the latter two are clickable if your phone supports this function), along with as much of the message as will transmit. The form imposes brevity, so you should be able to puzzle out what is wanted. Everything in the e-page is sent in the briefest practical form to maximize the amount of space left for the message.

Nothing has changed in the form of the user interface — and the UI should inherit its appearance from your CSS specification. But I’ve changed the way the software works internally and the way it installs, both to make it easier to deploy and to avoid conflicts with your ISP’s tech support team.

This contact form is built for WordPress.org weblogs only. It might work in other blogging platforms — and it will certainly work in any static PHP page — but that’s not what we’re talking about right now. You can install the contact form in your sidebar, provided you know how to edit the theme file called sidebar.php. If you have a PHP plug-in installed in your weblog, you can install the form on a WordPress Page, perhaps adding a “Contact Me” button on your sidebar.

Nota bene: There can only be one “Submit” button per page in HTML, so, if you install the contact form on your sidebar, your search button is no longer going to work. If you have to kick something off the sidebar and onto a WordPress Read more

Unlocking the scenius of BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix, a hands-on, step-by-step, learn-by-doing guerrilla marketing boot camp

This came in by email, but I’m answering it publicly because I expect the question is fairly common:

I am a member of the Cyberprofessionals group. I was unable to attend the session in Orlando and therefore missed your presentation. I have read the materials about the upcoming event in Phoenix and I’m not entirely sure what it’s all about. From what I can see it’s going to be about blogging, and that’s great, but I have perhaps a more broad interest in social networking as well. I know some of the people involved may be experts in that. Could you give me some idea as to the time that is going to be devoted to each of the subject matters.

For a start, let me say that everything I’m saying right now is subject to change. We have some of this ironed out in detail, but much is still to be determined. Moreover, we’re pretty flexible in the way we think. The world we live in upends itself entirely every 15 months or so, and we’re always prepared to turn on a dime. Even so, BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix is going to break out something like this:

First, as I’ve said, the event is going to be a hands-on, step-by-step, learn-by-doing guerrilla marketing boot camp. Our students will be with us for 72 hours total, and out of that time, we could end up working 54 or more hours. We are going to take on every aspect of your marketing praxis, and we’re going to rebuild as much of it as we can in our time together. If you do the prep work your instructors are going to recommend, and if you come to Phoenix prepared to work, you’ll fly home exhausted but with a completely overhauled marketing profile — online, in the social graph, in print and face-to-face.

That’s ambitious, but we can pull it off because we intend to work like no other marketing conference you’ve ever been to or heard about. You are literally going to do the actual work you are learning about — as you learn about it. It Read more

BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix will be a hands-on overhaul of your online and offline marketing – enroll now to be sure you get a seat

We’ve got the dates for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix: April 28th to May 1st, 2009.

We’ve got the location: The Radisson Phoenix Airport Hotel North, 427 North 44th St, Phoenix, AZ 85008.

And we’ve got the game plan: A three-day Guerilla Marketing Boot Camp during which you’re going to completely revise your marketing profile — in class. We’re not going to tell you how we work. We’re not going to show you how we work. We’re going to work with you, hands-on, step-by-step as we overhaul your marketing strategy from the ground up.

What are we missing? You. Skip ahead if you’re ready to register for the most intense real estate marketing conference you will ever attend.

Got questions? Here are some BloodhoundBlog posts discussing Unchained in Orlando and anticipating the scenius to come in Phoenix:

Want to know even more? Why not. We’re in the marketing business, after all.

Who should come to BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix? If it’s part of your job to attract and convert new business, we have what you need. On BloodhoundBlog, we talk a lot about Social Media Marketing, but in our own businesses, we work with Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Direct Marketing and good old-fashioned belly-to-belly sales. We also work directly with internet-based tools from PHP to RSS to CSS — acronym soup.

Why should you come? We’ll be going through every bit of this at BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix. Not lecturing as you race to keep up in your notes, but actually doing the work, hands-on, on your own marketing materials.

How will you benefit? Not only will you completely overhaul your existing marketing profile, you’ll learn how Read more

Who wants to play the Scenius game? Rebuilding The Long List as a micro-blog

All right, let’s play a little, shall we?

One of the things that came out of our little scenius on Thanksgiving (which continues through today) was a better way of handling the job I used to do with The Long List of Odysseus Medal nominees. I’ve been ignoring that chore since last Spring, a plausible clue that I just might end up ignoring it forevermore. Even so, it was a good idea, and I learned a lot of cool stuff from the code I wrote to manage The Long List scroller that used to live in our sidebar.

What I want to do for now is to implement another kind of sidebar scroller, this one more like a micro-blog of useful and informative posts — mostly marketing, but other matters of importance as well. There were people who used The Long List as their feed reader, and this should work even better in that regard.

You can see it in our sidebar right now. It’s the scroller box headed “SCENIUS: SWITCHED-ON MARKETING” — with links to 50 highly-relevant weblog posts.

If you want to play along with the development process, you can be a big help.

How?

Break this software:

<!-- BEGIN Scenius -->
<p><div style="display:block; width:95%;
height:320px; overflow:auto; padding-left:6px;
padding-right:6px; padding-top:3px;
border:1px solid #a9a9a9; ">
<?PHP $ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 
"http://scenius.bloodhoundblog.net/");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); ?></div></p>
<!-- END Scenius -->

I’m serious. I want you to install that code in your sidebar and see if you can break it.

There are two ways we know of that you might be able to break it.

First, the PHP may not want to work for you. If that happens, I would love to see a screen shot in your email to me about what happened. So you know: I do not believe this will happen. We broke it every which way yesterday, and I think I have code that should work on any true Apache web server.

The second way that this code could fail is that it might not look right. It should come into your sidebar as a well-behaved citizen. It should inherit your sidebar’s style sheets, and it should scroll top to bottom but not left to Read more

The Thanksgiving Day scenius at BloodhoundBlog

Teri Lussier and Eric Blackwell get up early in a time zone two hours earlier than mine. Cheryl Johnson lives an hour later than me, but I don’t think she ever sleeps. Anyway, this morning I woke up to Teri, Eric and Cheryl gnawing on a bunch of insanely great ideas by email.

That’s a scenius, y’all: Smart, focused people concentrating on well-understood problems, looking for innovative solutions.

I chipped in a little here and a little there, and then, just like that, we landed on a brand new way of thinking about community building with hyper-local weblogs.

My piece of the puzzle was new software, but what we’re doing is not a tool but a praxis, a working procedure. As a consequence, I’m not going to teach this until BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix. I’ll show you how to use your weblog to make better connections with other local — non-real estate — blogs, even as you both improve your SEO and maximize the SEO benefits of weblogging. This is killer stuff, literally the hammer-tap in just the right spot, a cornucopia of benefits for a minimal effort.

But: It involves theory, preparation and a certain amount of software hacking, so we’re going to do it when we can do it all together, side-by-side and step-by-step in Phoenix.

I know money is tight. Pinch your pennies and bring them to Phoenix. We’re going to make it worth your while…

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As an expression of gratitude to the Bloodhounds, here’s an Unchained Melody for Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving was a holiday established by productive people to celebrate the success of their work. –Ayn Rand

I love this place — this life, this earth and this tiny little corner of the net. The accretion of evidence leads me to believe that the world is becoming more and more the realm I would have designed for myself. Yes, we’re headed into serious economic trouble, and, yes, we’re headed that way under the leadership of a man who has never held a job in his life and who makes no secret that he knows nothing about the causes of wealth and poverty.

But: Even so: So what?

We are on the cusp of riches without limits. We are literally standing around getting soaked to the skin as soup rains down from the skies, and yet we are so much in the thrall of our treasured wounds that we can’t even see it. That much, at least, is a correctable nuisance.

The curtain goes up at eleven tonight on Act Three of my life, and I know better than anyone that I am the best beneficiary of the riches I talk about. All my life people have asked me for writing advice, and, without intending to be glib, I told them simply this: Have something to say, and have a way of saying it. I am befriended by the times, and — amazingly to me — I am by now able to ship these piles of ore I have quarried from my mind. Do you want to know how to change the world forever, for the good? You do it one mind at a time — starting with your own.

I’m grateful to the Bloodhounds — to the people who read, comment and write here — both for BloodhoundBlog and for Unchained. I’m thankful for our clients, who have been prosperous enough to keep us in business. I don’t think I ever adequately express my gratitude to Cathleen, who gives me everything that can be had from another person. There are so many others — Richard Riccelli and Brian Brady and Teri Lussier — so I hope Read more

What’s Mu? Pulling unforeseen results out of BloodhoundBlog.net

We launched BloodhoundBlog.net just a week and a day ago, and already WordPress-MultiUser is changing my approach to everything in the weblogging world.

First, just as a caveat: It’s a bear to set up. Because of BloodhoundBlog, we have an enormous amount of server horsepower, but I think it matters a great deal that we live on a dedicated server. We can customize the host to live the way we need it to live, and we command a lot of tech support attention from Hostgator.com — which has been invaluable.

But as with the discussion of FeedWordPress, living in the Mu universe leads to different ways of thinking.

An example: We’re wrestling with domain mapping right now, but, once we get it working, we will be able to put our affiliated vendors into their own blogs, running under their own domain names, in two wags of a BloodPuppy’s tail. If you think about the agony of setting up unique WordPress.org blogs, the upfront effort of getting WP-Mu to run will be handsomely repaid.

Likewise, both WordPress (dot org) and WP-Mu were upgraded to version 2.6.5 tonight. I already upgraded the BloodhoundBlog.net weblogs. And sometime between now and Sunday, I will get to upgrade a solid dozen WP.org blogs. Between now and the new year, most or all of those will be moving to a new WP-Mu installation.

Here’s the best bet: The ability to set up clone weblogs on demand will permit a very granular kind of hyper-local weblogging. This suggests to me one or two more WP-Mu installations, strictly for real estate purposes.

And here’s a great big what’s more: Give me another week with this software and let’s see what else I can come up with…

Introducing BloodhoundBlog.net, free WordPress weblogs for real estate professionals

Say hello to BloodhoundBlog.net, free WordPress Multi-user weblogs for real estate professionals.

We talked about doing this in Orlando, at the scenius on Swallow Hill Road. Where we started was with the idea of WordPress blogs for the CyberProfessionals to practice on.

We saw that the right system could serve the same function for any novice bloggers — including all of the folks on Active Rain looking to make the leap to WordPress weblogging.

And BloodhoundBlog.net can also be a space for BloodhoundBlog Unchained instructors to help their students get their homework together before coming to Phoenix.

Will this be your last word in real estate weblogging? It can be, but that strikes me as a poor idea. What we’re offering is a free weblogging platform where real estate professionals can learn and grow, ultimately to go off and set up their own WordPress.org weblogs.

And you had better know this is an Unchained weblogging world: You can import content from a host of blogging platforms, and everything you do on BloodhoundBlog.net is easily exported when you’re ready to move on.

If you want to go ahead and get started, just go to BloodhoundBlog.net and set up a new blog. It’s fast, easy and fun.

Still here? Who should set up a BloodhoundBlog.net weblog?

  • Stone newbies. If you want to learn to weblog, you might as well start with the best software, among people who can help you develop the best possible practices.
  • Intermediate bloggers. If you’ve been toying with Active Rain or with real estate forums, it might be time to put away childish things. The work you do with us will transfer easily to a full-blown WordPress.org weblog.
  • Kindred spirits. If you want to build a community of like minds, the price of doing so here can’t be beat.
  • Adhocracy activists. A weblog is the perfect means of coordinating, for example, the Wine-Tasting Realtors of Biloxi.
  • Teachers of lessons profound and arcane — starting with the slave-drivers of BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix.

How can we do this? We have the horsepower — dawgpower — that’s how. Even so, we’re not letting you all the way off the leash. There are plug-ins, but Read more

Adding a Print Stylesheet to Your WordPress Blog

I have a Dead Tree Addiction.  Somehow words seem clearer and truer, and their cadence more lovely when I read them on a printed page, rather than a computer screen.

So, when I read a well written blog post, one that addresses an important issue, one that speaks clearly to me,  my first inclination is to hit “PRINT”.  And all rational reasoning to the contrary, sometimes that urge to PRINT just simply cannot be denied.

Unfortunately many WordPress theme designers neglect to include a print stylesheet in their theme files, and the resultant printer output often contains an endless jumble of sidebar images and unusable navigation link text.

If you’d like to make it easy for your readers to print your posts, add a print stylesheet.  Here’s how:

In a plain text editor (Windows Notepad works just fine) create a new file named print.css

Paste this CSS code into your print.css file

#nav {display: none; }

#sidebar {display: none; }

#content {width: 100%; margin: 0; float: none;}

a:link, a:visited {color: #000000}

That’s it, that’s all.  The code is saying: “Don’t display the navigation bar, don’t display the sidebar, don’t print the links in fancy colors, and fill the entire width of the page with the post content”.

Save the print.css file, and upload it to your WordPress blog host.  Place it in the individual theme’s folder; the most likely path would be something like mysite.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/mytheme.

Now at the WordPress dashboard, go Design -> Theme Editor -> and in the Theme Files – Templates column, click on header.php to open the file.

Paste the code below into your header.php file, right below all the other lines that start with link rel=”stylesheet”

<link type=”text/css” media=”print” rel=”stylesheet” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_url’); ?>/print.css” />

Make sure it is above the line that reads </head>. Click Update File.  This little piece of code is telling the system that if it receives a “print” command, to apply the print stylesheet instead of the “media” styleheet.

To test, click Visit Site, click File -> Print Preview

Notice that I did not remove the Footer.  If you’d like all printouts to include your contact information, the footer can be Read more

Podcast: Teri Lussier talks about using weblogs to build relationships at BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando

In the song Extraordinary Machine, Fiona Apple sings, “I’m good at being uncomfortable so I can’t stop changing all the time.” You might take a census of the Bloodhounds to see to whom that sentiment applies. I know it does to me. I think it does to Teri Lussier, too. She’s not cranky or irascible, but she has a keen awareness of how far from perfect things can be — how much better they could be if we were to work a little harder.

Teri spoke at BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando on using weblogs to build and sustain relationships. Linked below is an MP3 podcast file of her presentation, but we’ll precede that with an Unchained Melody, a bootleg video of Fiona with Nickel Creek:


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The scenius on Swallow Hill Road: A brief gloss on BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando, November 7th, 2008

When we put together BloodhoundBlog Unchained In Phoenix, last Spring, we were gifted with the magnificent beneficence of Zillow.com. In consequence, we spent money like a college freshman with a Visa card. We knew Unchained in Orlando was going to have to be a leaner affair — and after this fall’s market collapse, it got quite a bit leaner than we had expected.

We knew were were going to have five or six Bloodhounds presenting, so I resolved to rent a house to save us all money on hotel rooms. We got a five-bedroom seasonal rental, in a community I choose to call West Disney, for $621 — a smokin’ deal for what turned out to be 5 dawgs plus Teri Lussier’s husband, Jamie.


Brian Brady with Teri and Jamie Lussier.

Emphasis: My objective in renting the home was to save money. That’s all.

Unintended consequence: The scenius on Swallow Hill Road.

Say what?

I’ve talked about the idea of a scenius before. A scenius is a kind of communal genius. When deeply-passionate, passionately-informed people get together to share what they know, the synergy of their interaction can throw off vast quantities of new ideas. This is what happened with us at our house on Swallow Hill Road.

The Unchained event was a rockin’ success. It was better than Unchained in Phoenix had been — which surprised no one more than me and Brian Brady. It’s unfair to say we topped ourselves, though. It was the speakers who made Orlando a killer event.

Here’s an example, a brief clip from the keynote address by Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate CEO Sherry Chris:

Brian has other videos, so we’ll see if we can get those posted in the next couple of days.

Sherry was great, but all of the speakers were at the top of their game. I don’t want to take anything away from anyone by saying that Kelley Koehler and Mitch Ribak were off the charts excellent — rich presentations full of practical, ready-to-implement techniques. John Sabia took voluminous notes that I’ll be linking to tomorrow, so you’ll be able to reap the essence of the day’s presentations.

Plus which, Read more

BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando — Schedule of events

Okay, so now you have to be careful to make no more than $249,900. 😉

If you’re not already there, come see us Friday in Orlando. Here’s the class schedule:

08:00 Opening
08:15 Greg Swann – The Unchained Epiphany
09:00 Brian Brady – Ninja Social Media Marketing
10:00 Sherry Chris – Keynote Address
10:45 Teri Lussier – Building a Community Through Blogging
11:30 Lunch Break
12:15 Point/Counter-Point On Social Media Marketing
01:00 Kelley Koehler – What To Do When Google Doesn’t Love You
02:15 Mitch Ribak – Internet Marketing Conversion
04:30 Dinner Break
05:15 John Rowles on IDX
05:45 Sean Purcell – The Bloodhound Way
06:30 Eric Blackwell – Leveraged Search Engine Marketing
08:00 Closing

Click on the PayPal button shown below to get your $99 ticket for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando on Friday, November 7th, 2008


















When: Friday, November 7th, 2008, 8 am to 8 pm

Where: Crowne Plaza Hotel and Conference Center, Orlando Airport, 5555 Hazeltine National Dr, Orlando, FL 32812

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Prequel to Speaking in Tongues: Displaying Author Images in WordPress

Several months ago, Greg described this process in Project Bloodhound speaking in tongues: To whom am I speaking?

At the time, I had no need to implement author images in a WordPress multi-author blog, (and I already knew the technique for TypePad), so I didn’t work with the process until just today.

As I set up what will become a company blog for our incoming agents, I realized that the average WordPress user might need a little more background information to put Greg’s code to use.

First of all, you need to find all your authors’ ID numbers.  Unfortunately current versions of WordPress do not show author ID numbers.  The easy solution for me was to download the Reveal IDs for WP Admin plugin.

Once the Reveal IDs plugin is activated, when you go to the Users page, you’ll see each author’s ID number displayed beside their username.  All ID numbers, that is, except your own.  The only way to see your own ID number is to create a new separate admin username and login, then login as that new identity, and find your old self on the list.

Next step:  Obtain images of each author.  Resize each image (I decided on 52 pixels in height, and 50 pixels in width as appropriate for the design I am using.)  Each image must be named simply by the author ID number.  For instance, my lovely image here on Bloodhound Blog is titled 34.jpg.

Upload all the newly resized and newly renamed images to your blog’s root directory.

Now you are ready to rock and roll.

Open your Main Index Template file (index.php)

I simplified Greg’s code for now to only display the author’s image and name

<img src=”http://www.bobtaylorproperties.com/blog/<?php the_author_ID(); ?>.jpg” height=”52″ width=”50″ align=”left” hspace=”10″>
Posted by <?php the_author() ?> <br>

And I placed it under the PHP code that inserts the post title.  Here’s the complete snippet:

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<div class=”entry”>

<h1><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark” title=”<?php the_title(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h1>

<img src=”http://www.bobtaylorproperties.com/blog/<?php the_author_ID(); ?>.jpg” height=”52″ width=”50″ align=”left” Read more

Introducing RE.net’s Hottest Bloggers Contest

In an effort to increase subscriptions and ad revenue, I have devised an ingenious new contest to identify the hottest bloggers on the real estate net. If there is one thing we can learn from People Magazine and the Republican Party – substance is secondary – most important: there is nothing that a “hot” headshot and $150,000 or so bucks can’t do to increase popularity and a list of the sexiest “insert your own category”.

Let’s put those bloglogs to good use! Start scanning your Twitter followers – clearly there are some hotties in the mix. Why not nominate a few – heck, why not nominate yourself?

Content you ask? What content? Kids – this ain’t about what you say or think, it’s all about how you look – and Billy Crystal nailed it – “it’s not how you feel, it’s how you look – and you look marvelous!”

You want to drive ad revenue to you site? Listen – sex sells. Adorning your blog with the “Hottest Blogger in the RE.net” will drive the kind of subscription traffic you’ve been longing.

Oops – gotta run – my stylist just called. She’s bringing over Armani for my photo shoot. I’m doing a series of new headshots for my avatar. We’re going to shoot a few – you know – the “too hot to handle” look – the “come hither” look. I’m banking on the “I’m too sexy for my content” look.

Money in the bank.

Twenty-five most influential bloggers? Influence upon whom? Toward what objectives? Or: Why collectivism makes my skin crawl

Brad Coy sends news that I have been named as one of the Inman News “25 Most Influential Bloggers” for 2008. I don’t know this first-hand, since you have to be a member of the Inman Secret Handshake Club to gain access to the “Special Report.” Not quite true: You can also buy the thrilling “Special Report” for only $79.00. That’s only $3.16 an influencer.

But wait: The price just went up to $3.29 an influencer, since, as with last year, I am renouncing this denomination.

I’m sure the people who named me to this list thought they were offering me some sort of distinction. To the contrary, I see it as a diminution of the work we are doing here. Among the influencers are people I see as being active exponents of knowing evil. The rest are decent-enough folks, but I don’t see them, for the most part, as being stout advocates for anything that I regard as being good or vital or important. Nice people, but they’re just people.

Influence by itself is a meaningless standard of value: Fifty million Frenchmen can be as wrong as one. For the most part, the people in the RE.net whose opinions matter most to me already write here — and, of course, those great minds are all but entirely omitted from Inman’s list, even though their influence is more-positive and more-consequential than many of those included.

But none of that matters. What matters is this: I am either right or I am wrong — as are you. Agreement means nothing, endorsement means nothing, beauty contests mean nothing, dipshit lists like this mean nothing. All that matters is the quality of your thinking and and quality of your writing. The world is made by minds, not mobs, and I don’t want my name to be used to contradict that proposition.

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