Category: Technology (page 38 of 60)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Tomorrow there will be an interview with me published that will make a point to mention that BloodhoundBlog carries no advertising. So today seems like a good time to post our first ad.

My son Cameron is graduating from casual uses for money — fast food, CDs, movies, computer games — to more serious financial needs — like cars, car insurance, gas. We’re kinda happy about this, actually, because, even though internal resources are the best motivations, being hungry for money and the things it can buy will do in a pinch.

So: Cameron is finally interested in working reliably for money. He’s been doing great work for us, and we’re on the verge of rebuilding our automated web page/web site generator software so that other people can use it. This is wicked slick, and I encourage you to Watch This Space. When we’re done, we’ll have software that you can use to communicate with your clients in web pages or web sites, just as we do now.

In the mean time, though, Cameron wants to earn more money, and I want to help him. So if you scroll down the sidebar, you’ll see his ad, an offer to build a WordPress weblog from scratch and host it for a year for $500. He knows how to build a blog our way — he builds many of ours already — and I’ll be riding herd on him to make sure he delivers on his promises. I think he’s priced pretty aggressively — say so if you disagree.

We’ve never given Cameron money. He’s always had to earn his own funds. I don’t know that he’s all that financially astute even now. I don’t know that I am, either. But at 16 he’s a rockin’ web programmer who can build you a quality product. It will be interesting to see if he can build a good business from his skills.

Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing, technology

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I owe more “Speaking in tongues” stuff, but I think I may have bored everyone to tears. This, by pointed contrast, is purely for fun.

Copy this code:

<?PHP
$thepath = $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'];
$dir = '*';
if ($Bfolder) $dir = "$Bfolder/*";

foreach (glob($dir, GLOB_ONLYDIR) as $filename)
   {
   if (!$Bfolder) echo ("<BR>");
   ?>
   <a href="<?PHP echo($filename); 
   ?>" target="_blank">
   <?PHP echo($filename); ?></a><BR>
   <?PHP
   $URL = urlencode($filename);
   include ("http://$thepath/windex.php?Bfolder=$URL");
   }
?>

and paste it into a text file.

Save the file with the name “windex.php”.

FTP it into the top level of your file server.

Then go here:

http://MyServer.com/windex.php

substituting the name of your server for “MyServer”, of course.

What are you seeing? The entire directory tree of your file server expressed as links. Each sub-hierarchy of folders is visually separated by a space, just to make things pretty. Each one of those links will work, opening into a web page if the folder contains an HTML “index” file, or to a Unix like directory representation if not.

Just a toy, just for fun. I’d explain it to you, but then you’d have to kill me.

Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing, technology

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Wanna see something cool?

Google indexes 2,850 pages for BloodhoundBlog. Out of those, 1,900 have been spidered and reindexed since last Saturday, when I added the scrolling panel of Odysseus Medal long-list nominees.

That’s two-thirds of everything spidered and reindexed in a span of seven days.

That little scrolling box is already the best link blog in the RE.net, documenting every post of moment anyone thinks to nominate.

I am not an SEO, and I am not even all that much in love with SEO as an audience-building strategy. But, even so, the structure of the thing — nearly-continuously varying content in what is pure HTML by the time a spider sees it — seems to be catnip to Google.

I think I know why this is happening, and I’ll know more soon. But in advance of certainty, I built a similar list for BloodhoundRealty.com, a scrolling catalog of my Arizona Republic columns.

I’m keeping those in date-order, so the list will only update once a week. But, obviously, that site gets spidered a lot less frequently, anyway.

As an interlinear note, if you are linked from BloodhoundBlog, your links were spidered a bunch of times this week.

If you write for BloodhoundBlog, your links were spidered a minimum of 3,800 times. Doesn’t mean the linked pages or sites were also spidered, necessarily, but it can’t hurt.

Here’s my thinking:

First, you should put the scrolling list of Odysseus Medal long-list nominees in your sidebar. It’s well-behaved and non-intrusive, fitting neatly into your design scheme. It’s a nice list of very good reading, updated frequently. It’s link-love back to the authors of the nominated posts. And, for now at least, it’s a potent search engine attractant.

Here is the code to paste into your sidebar:

<?php
include ("https://bloodhoundrealty.com/BloodhoundBlog/TheLongList.php");
?>

Second, Cameron will build you something like this, if you want it. For example, you could have a randomized scrolling list of your flagship posts, the content you want to make sure your readers see. That would deep-link back into your own weblog, so it would benefit your audience now, and it should help your search engine performance over the long haul. Let me know if you’re Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I never know what other people don’t see. Cathleen didn’t know that BloodhoundBlog and DistinctivePhoenix.com are based on the same WordPress template. Likewise for Real Estate Weblogging 101 and The Phoenix Real Estate Technology Exchange. She could see the differences, but not the similarities, not until I noodged her to look for them. Yesterday, I posted on a program that works out of an array, and it was only after I had hit publish that it occurred to me that I hadn’t defined what an array is. My expectation is that these posts, professions of enthusiasm notwithstanding, are progenitors of a profound megoism, but, if anyone craves a deeper understanding of arrays, email me.

Meanwhile, take a look at this image:

This is a highly-stylized rendition of what Easter will look like in a world where pi equals four. No, that’s not right. It’s a map to very common sort of web page layout in the world of Cascading Style Sheets. If we ignore the differences and focus only on the similarities, that stylized page looks like… this page. And your own web pages, very probably, and dozens or hundreds of other pages that you’ve seen. There can be superficial differences — the sidebar can be on the left, or there can be two sidebars, or the two sidebars can straddle the main content area — but what we’re looking at, at bottom, is the essence of a text-oriented web page in the CSS world.

Why think about this?

(Oh, man! Don’t get me started! I’m going to think about it, with you or without you, because I want for there to be at least one space in the void where it’s permissible to have a brain…)

Wait, that’s not why. Here’s why: Because if we think about how pages are engineered, we can engineer them.

Like this: If we see a page like that on a web site — a page like this one — we know that it’s just one of tens or hundreds or thousands of pages, all of which will look pretty much the same.

Here’s an important question: When one of those pages Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I know I promised to do nothing but “includes,” and we’ll come back to those soon, but here is a real PHP routine, doing an actual real world job. What does it do? For a multi-author weblog like BloodhoundBlog, it produces a blogroll of the contributors’ weblogs or web sites. I’m sending this out to Morgan Brown, because Blown Mortgage is a multi-author blog — and because Morgan has joined ranks with Cheryl Johnson as a geek-blogger.

Why do this with software when it can be done with the “Links” feature within WordPress? Because a list done this way is self-maintaining. This code is based on the “Frequent Contributors” code on BloodhoundBlog — which would be a lot harder to explain. I added this last week when I upgraded to WordPress 2.3.2.

Here’s the code. I’ll go back through it and comment line-by-line:

<h2>Our Contributors' Web Sites</h2><UL>

<?PHP
$contribs = array(1,3,6,8,9);
$count = sizeof($contribs);
shuffle($contribs);
for($i=0;$i<$count;$i++)
	{
	$thisUser = $contribs[$i];
	$curauth = get_userdata($thisUser);
	?>
	<li><a href="<?PHP echo $curauth->user_url; ?>" 
	target="_blank">
	<?php echo $curauth->yim; ?></a></li>
	<?PHP
	}
?></UL>

Here’s the thing: PHP is a very sloppy language.

From Ada Lovelace to Kernighan and Richie, programming was always done with very tight, very clean code. Hardware was slow and expensive, so programmers were, relatively speaking, plentiful and cheap. Moore’s Law inverts that paradigm, with the result that any cost in hardware is worth bearing to maximize programmer time. This is why you’re always buying bigger, faster hardware, because programmers are sucking up every bit of it and then some. ANSI C was perhaps the apogee of the orbit for clean code: Strongly typed, strict syntax, unforgiving compilers. But, written right, C could get right down to the bone, running as fast, or almost as fast, as functionally-equivalent machine code.

PHP is like C in many, many respects — except that, like Javascript before it, it dispenses with type-checking, function prototyping, most syntax-checking, etc. It’s interpreted at run-time, not compiled, so there’s no compiler to catch errors. Instead of maximizing machine resources, PHP maximizes programmer time. It exists to let a skilled programmer bang out tons of original code in no time flat. Many other web programming environments are similarly loose, and, while this grates Read more