Random thoughts on art, technology, stuff, and occasionally Real Estate: September 2007

I've been taking screen shots for the last couple days.  Hoping to catch the magic 50,000.  I missed it.  But it was fun anyway:

Wednesday 9/26/2007 5:00AM PDT:

Wednesday 9/26/2007 5:10PM PDT:

Thursday 9/27/2007 4:40AM PDT:

Thursday 9/27/2007 4:45PM PDT:

Friday 9/28/2007 5:45AM PDT:

Friday 9/28/2007  6:31AM PDT

I'm a nosey busybody.  But everyone already knew that.   I came across this on Inman's blog

"ActiveRain, an online real estate blogging community and social network with about 47,000 members, has filed a lawsuit against property-search giant Move Inc. that seeks millions in damages and alleges that Move broke the law when it backed out of an acquisition plan and launched its own blogging platform."

So far, I haven't come across any other information, and of course, I'm curious.  I'd like to know more.  Any one else know more than the Inman post?

Thanks to Carole Provenzle, I have rekindled an interest in Feng Shui.  If fact, I even found a stash of Feng Shui books I'd bought a few years ago, never read back then, and hauled them off the shelf. 

This is the one I picked up first:  Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life  by Karen Rauch Carter, while its probably not a textbook for purists, it dispenses a lot of information in a kind of fun, humourous way.  It seems to be a good introduction to Feng Shui.

I happened to flip open to a page discussing the Helpful People area of the bagua. 

First of all, a the bagua is a basic Feng Shui idea that says various areas in a building or in a room correspond to various areas of our lifes.

Here is a diagram of a bagua:

Step through the main entry door, then look directly to your right ... the front right corner of the home is your Helpful People zone.

I never gave much thought to Helpful People.  Hell, I'm self-sufficient.  I do my own thing in my own way ... what do I need with Helpful People?

Karen Rauch Carter's Helpful People chapter gave an example of a contractors:  You know the ones that rip a big hole in your house, and then disappear for several days.

Oh. My. Gosh.  My neighbors have a large project going on and I hadn't seen the contractor on the site for over a week.  True it's the neighbor's project, but one of the items in the project is the wall/fence dividing our properties, so I am rather intimately involved regardless.

Following Karen's advice, early yesterday morning, I found a little silver colored box amid my stuff.  (I do have a lot of stuff around, too much stuff, in fact, but I'll work on that later.)   I filled the box with good intentions for the contracter, and I set it in the Helpful People area of my house.

Darned if the contractor didn't show up about an hour later and get back to work!  Maybe he planned on coming yesterday anyway, but humor me here.

Suddenly I see Helpful People in a whole new light.  Our clients, buyers and sellers are Helpful People.  They are helping us make a living and achieve our goals.  If we own rental properties, our tenants are Helpful People, they are helping us pay the mortgage. Our business associaties are Helpful People. Our employees and staffers are Helpful People.  The clerks we interact with when we buy things are Helpful People.  The contributing writers on my outside blogs are Helpful People.  The bloggers that I depend on for news, ideas and opinions are Helpful People.

How did I live this long without realizing how many Helful People there are in my life?!!  I wish them all prosperity, peace, joy, and many blessings!

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If you haven't tried this before, it is an interesting little exercise:

Google the address of one of your listings.  Like this:

For example, our listing at 5024 Lincoln yielded these results:

Our vflyer postings show up in first and second postion, followed by our own Hotsheet blog, then Zillow, then LAlife (I have no clue who LAlife is, will have to check them out.) Trulia comes in sixth postion.

 Another example, our listing at 3800 Scandia Way

On this one, our craigslist posting shows up first, followed by another craigslist posting that seems to have gotten jumbled up with something in Long Beach.  Third and fourth position goes to Trulia.  The vflyer posting comes in fifth, followed by Bob's posting on Active Rain.

Interesting, huh?

P.S.  Also interesting to note:  There is a single property website out there for 5024 Lincoln, that the photographer created:  http://www.5024lincolnavenue.com  That didn't show up on the first page of the search results. 

Very interesting.

UPDATE:  It gets even more interesting.  I just re-ran the search on 3800 Scandia.  In less than one hour, things have changed.  Trulia has moved into second and third position.  Vflyer in fourth postion.  And this VERY blog post here on Active Rain has moved into fifth position:

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Feedblitz turns your blog into an email newsletter, by grabbing each blog post and sending it out to your subscriber list as an email.

Everyone following my foray into FeedBlitz, here are the basic steps in setting up a new newsletter:

After creating your account, go to My Account, My Dashboard

Under Newsletter Center, click Set up a newsletter

Under Article creation, select Automatically, from an RSS feed or blog.

Enter the URL or your Bog.  (Yes FeedBlitz works with Active Rain -- the URL of your Active Rain Blog looks something like this http://activerain.com/blogs/cheryljns  )

Most blogs automatically generate RSS feeds.  FeedBlitz will ask whether you want to use the Atom, RSS1 or RSS2 feed to create your newsletter.  Click on the View (binoculars) icon to see a sample of each feed.  Click on the words "Atom" or "RSS" to select that version of the feed.

Here is what the sample subscription looks like for my NELA Live blog with the ATOM feed.  (By the way, my RSS feed looks the same.)

FeedBlitz will then walk you through about 10 different set-up screens.  FeedBlitz will work just fine even if you leave all of these blank, or just accept the defaults.  One setting that was important for me:  I choose Express Delivery... The email is sent out as soon as I publish the blog post:

When the set-up is complete, FeedBlitz will take you to the Summary page.  Click Add subscription forms to your site to grab the HTML to copy and paste into your blog.

Drag over the HTML code to select it.  Hit Edit -> Copy.  Now you are ready to Paste the code into your blog or website.  The finished Widget (with a tiny bit of tweaking) looks like this:

The email newsletter received by your subscribers looks like this:

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I have been so swamped with stuff-to-do in the offline world, I haven't had a good chance to work with Photomatix yet.  

But I figured most members would get a chuckle out of my first experiments.  (This post started out as a comment-reply on an earlier post.)

Lesson Number One:  The positioning of objects in the images pretty much needs to match up in each image, unless you like ghosts -- like this:

Oops.  (You can stop giggling now, Bryce)  However, I can see that the tone quality of final result will be quite pleasing.  This was done using Combine -> Highlight & Shadows, rather than HDR -> Generate.

Sub-set One of Lesson Number One:  Shooting with a tripod would be a good idea. 

Sub-set Two of Lesson Number One:  Do not skew the images before Combining or Generating.

I can see that using photos shot with auto-bracketing would make a lot of sense.   Auto-bracketed images were NOT used in my ghostly sample above, nor was a tripod, and as you see, I moved around a bit between snapping the shots.  The images were shot with a V705.  For the next experiment, I'll use one of the DSLRs.

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A great thing about Active Rain is that I can use it as a testing ground for features I am considering for "outside blogs".

Case in point:  FeedBlitz.  You'll notice I installed the FeedBlitz subscription widget in the right column column of my Active Rain Blog.  Readers wanting to subscribe to the blog by email can just enter their email address and click "subscribe me".

And since I always test things things all the way through ....

After clicking on "subscribe me" a reader will be taken to the verification page, like this:

Followed by an instruction/disclaimer page like this:

And they are sent a activation email, that they must respond to in order to activate the subscription, like this:

OK.  I think most of my outside blog readers can handle this.  Now to get the other blogs set up on the FeedBlitz "Newsletter" program.

I'll post my info on how to do ~that~ later.

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We have maintained an email subscription "hotsheet" since about 1996, to announce new listings, price reductions, etc.   There are a few hundred people on the subcriber list.

We also have a "hotsheet" blog http://www.taylorhotsheet.com for the same purpose.

I've been thinking of of using FeedBlitz to automate the process.  If I understand correctly FeedBlitz will turn each new blog post into an automatic email sent to the subscriber list. 

Yes, we could tell people just to subcribe to the RSS feed.  But I think, out there in the real world <s>, most ordinary folks are more comfortable and familiar with email.

Anyone else out there using FeedBlitz?  Any comments, feedback on it?

Wow.  I mean, really, wow!  Did I say Wow?  I haven't got this excited over a piece of software for a long time.   But, Bryce Mohan gave us a look at one of his secret weapons, Photomatix. 

I was going to write a Beginner's tutorial on using the HDR (High Dynamic Range) function in Photoshop CS3.

But based on Bryce's recommendation, I downloaded and installed Photomatix.  (Free trial download, then $99.00 to register)  I think I like it.  Alot.  Give me a few days to play with it, then I'll report back.

I'm a registered owner/user of Photoshop CS3.  I also own/use Photoshop Elements 5.  This might be heresy, but I could see an agent/property photographer getting by with Elements($72.99) plus Photomatix($99.00) instead of Photoshop CS3($629.99)

There's another aspect to tagging your posts that hasn't been discussed in detail yet.  

Tags aggregrate information written by many different authors.  If you are thinking of tags in terms of your own SEO -  your own self promotion - you may not have given this much thought.   But if you are the one doing the "searching-for-information" thing, it is a real benefit.

For example,  if I click "harry potter" in my tag list, I see I have two posts tagged "harry potter".  Then, if I click the link marked "All member posts tagged with "harry potter""

I can see everything everyone has written about Harry, and tagged "harry potter":

So here's the thought for anyone writing tech tips, tutorials, etc.... We should all use the same tags when we're writing on the same subjects.

Another example, there is a large user group of Kodak V705 camera owners here.  Many have written about it with tips, opinions, or questions.   Most of the posts are tagged V705, a few are tagged Kodak V705.  If you look at the tag list for V705, is does not include posts that were tagged Kodak V705.

Just my 2 cents.

So, I wonder,  when I write about tagging, should I tag it "tagging". "tags" or something else?