Category: Technology (page 17 of 60)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

One of the features I built into the Universal Contact Form last night is source tracking. This is Direct Marketing 101 — know where your efforts are producing the best returns.

So to invoke the form with source-tracking, you would just do this:

http://www.domain.com/UniversalContactForm.php?source=CLad2

In this case, we’re assuming that the source of the click into the form is a Craigslist posting.

Same thing, but as a unique form:

http://www.domain.com/UniversalContactForm.php
?action=Relocation&source=CLad2

(I had to break the line at the question mark to make it fit. Here and below, these should be seen as being all one line.)

In reality, though, you’re not going to want to go directly to the form. You’re going to want to hit a landing page that has the form as its call to action. And, in light of that, you’re going to “include” the form in PHP.

Alas, the variables passed from the URL in your Craigslist ad will be lost. You can’t live without the action variable, but you already know what to do about that: Hard code it.

And that’s essentially what you’ll do with the source variable, as well — except you’ll soft code both variables by passing them through.

So you invoke the form like this:

include ("http://www.domain.com/UniversalContactForm.php
?action=$action&source=$source");

The action variable is being received into the PHP variable $action on the way into the landing page, and source is being received into $source. When you do the “include,” you are transferring to another variable space, so you need to pack up the two variables and ship them along as you go.

But having done that, the form has access to them, so it behaves just as you want it to. You can daisy-chain like that as many times as you need to and the form will still receive the variables.

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve talked before about the idea of a software universe — where the set of actions possible in a given software configuration is so large that you can come up with tools and techniques never anticipated by the developers.

We went through this last fall when we started playing with WordPress Multiuser — and I ended up with my “featured listings” database running out of two Scenius scenes.

I’ve been enthralled all week with the idea of web-based forms that can talk to — and drive — my Heap database. I want to revise every form we have to work the Heap way, and I have a zillion ideas for a zillion new forms.

In consequence, today I rewrote my Universal Contact Form for the fourth time.

What I wanted was something I could use in many circumstances, in pursuit of many objectives, without creating one-off, manually-edited versions of the form.

For one thing, I want to play with “Gooder Group”-style ideas in a big way, and that will require a bunch of unique forms. So I built a form that I could make unique by editing parameter files, rather than by editing and re-editing PHP code.

Here are the major changes:

1. Any headlines or text setting up the form are now outside of the form and are your responsibility. The form begins with the anti-spam disclaimer and ends with the “submit” button. Everything else is up to you.

2. The behavior of the Heap-specific initialization file now includes optional menu-selected landing pages. Kudos to Scott Cowan for this wonderful idea.

3. The form behaves differently based on the contents of the Heap-specific initialization file.

4. It is now possible to invoke custom configurations of the form via the calling URL.

5. I added optional source-tracking.

Taken altogether, this change to the Universal Contact Form permits you to create as many unique variations of the form as you might need.

But: That’s all just chatter. Let’s see it in action:

Register here to get your own copy of the newer, even more-universal Universal Contact Form

< ?PHP include("http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/UniversalContactForm.php?action=Register&source=BHB"); ?>

Play with it. Work with it. Let me know if you can break it.

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m not too dumb, I’m sure. Just dumb enough. When I released the Heap-specific version of the universal contact form, for some reason it didn’t occur to me that I could build a version of the form to deliver the product.

This omission I do hereby correct:

If you want a copy of the Heap-specific universal contact form — guess what? Fill out the form:

< ?PHP $ch = curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/SendTheFormForm.php"); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0); curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); ?>

It’s a pure geek thrill, but everything that happens after this is automated via Heap, untouched by human hands…

But I am always a sucker for the implications of my epiphanies, howevermuch they might be delayed.

So: This kind of thing would be ideal for that “Send for our free Relocation Guide” appeal.

Brian: Sign up for our free on-line webinar and find your way into our database funnel. And after the event, as the first of many, many touches, we’ll send you a free link to an iPod-ready version of the webinar so you can review the material while you work out.

By linking a PayPal button with a smart email client, I’m thinking you’ve got a hands-free on-line business using Heap. You can bet I’ll be playing with all of Unchained’s PayPal buttons.

I know there are walls we’re going to run into with Heap. Some we’ll surmount by being clever, but others are going to require growth in the feature set of the product. But I like the games I’m able to play so far.

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Pre-script: Here’s one of the secret benefits of working at BloodhoundBlog: If you screw up in really interesting ways, Direct Response provocateur Richard Riccelli will phone or email to tell you what you’re getting wrong. I’ve recast this post in response to a very instructive voicemail from Richard.

 
I had an email from Matt McGee — I had had it around Christmas, too, but Matt was kind enough to send it again. I’m going to deal with it as a colloquy.

Cari and I were chatting last night about Unchained ’09 and we’re both curious about the way you’ve been describing it on the blog:

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.

Can you provide some more detail on what you mean there — the stuff about not teaching, but doing? For example, if Cari’s there, she’s not going to be able to (nor does she want to, nor will I want her to) FTP in to her main web site or her blog and start rewriting pages, updating page titles and other SEO stuff, tweaking keywords, etc., on the fly.

Why wouldn’t she want to know how to do this? It’s easy to do, more unfamiliar than arcane, and we’re going to be right there, talking about what to do, how to do it — and what to do if something goes wrong.

BloodhoundBlog was less than a month old when I first wrote about the skills Realtors will need to compete in the age of the internet. We each of us should know how to do these things, both to solve our own problems, when we need to, and to make sure that hired vendors aren’t ripping us off. A big part of the work I have done here since then has been talking about the kinds of tasks Realtors and lenders can and should be doing on their own — to control costs and quality and simply to make sure these jobs are getting done Read more