Due to lack of interest we will be suspending realtortech.org for the time being. If you happen to read this post and are interested in contributing, please contact Stevie or Mike. It will remain on the net till about April 2009 so for the time being it will be available for reference. Thanks…

FireBug is the Swiss army knife of web development gadgets: an extension for Mozilla Firefox that allows you to debug, edit, and monitor any website’s CSS, HTML, DOM and JavaScript; it also provides other web development tools [1]. It permits the logging of web pages, page error reporting, page inspection, AJAX request logging, and to top it all off - Live Page Editing.

It has wound up being one of the most useful utilities that I have at my web page development/surfing disposal. One of its most useful tricks is the HTML inspector (view screenshot). If you are ever on a page, and are curious about the layout or inner workings of the HTML, just open up FireBug, click on Inspect->HTML and navigate your mouse to the section that interests you. FireBug will highlight the HTML code you are curious about, and you can look at it in all its raw markup glory. You can use this to easily find out how a nifty feature, or a design or layout works-or even to figure out a way around a pesky pop-up JavaScript link when you want to just send a link to someone.

In fact, one of my favorite uses is, when developing DOM interactive JavaScript, I can easily find an object within the entire document. And once it’s found, I can do all the nifty JavaScript manipulation I need.
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Hey social media types: Thought y’all (or more specifically, your members) might be interested in knowing about a new blogging benchmarking survey that we’re running at VARbuzz.com.

The Center for Real Estate and Social Technologies (CREST) is a new research and education program for REALTORS® who use social media in their business. CREST’s first initiative is a research survey that seeks to answer some of the most commonly asked questions about real estate blogging:

• What’s the average number of comments on a post?
• How many posts do REALTORS® write per month, on average?
• What’s the most common blogging platform?
• How many RSS subscribers does the average real estate blog have?
• And much, much more!

If you know of any REALTOR® bloggers in your neck of the woods, please send them to VARbuzz to take the survey. Also, if your communications department would be willing to announce this survey to your members, I’d be happy to provide them with a copy of the aggregate results and the executive summary when it’s ready. It will make for a very interesting story for your blogging agents and brokers!

Contact me with questions ben at varealtor dot com.

Sometimes I run across an idea that, despite being terrible, is/was still really popular (parachute pants, the Macarena, Dane Cook). Then there are the ideas that ARE truly great AND are popular (the transistor, antiseptics, Grand Theft Auto). Then there are the ideas that are truly great but just don’t quite catch on… ShiftSpace is one of those. Now I know this blog is more about posting usable info that will help us in our jobs, and ShiftSpace doesn’t fit that bill. But it’s such an interesting idea that I can’t help but write about it.
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Here in WA we are about to begin converting our database management system from Rapattoni to LAMPS. From some of the conversations I had at the Tech Directors Conference I’m curious to see how the process will play out.

I’d love to hear success stories, pitfalls, what to watch out for… anything that will let me peer into the world of LAMPS.

Of particular interest to me is LAMPS’ Website Manager. What kind of front-end code does it output? Is it XHTML? Does it pay attention to web standards? Will I have control of design and layout with CSS? If anyone can relate their experiences with this, I’d be eternally grateful.

What are your experiences, positive or negative, with LAMPS?

So here in WA State we have a new law going into effect on 6/12 that’s called the Distressed Properties Law. It will profoundly change how REALTORS® deal with foreclosures. To put it lightly, it has been a big deal for us getting our membership educated on the finer details and protocols called for in this new law.

At WA REALTORS®, our Communications and IT departments are one and the same. I’m usually involved in bringing certain aspects of our PR campaigns to the web. The Distressed Properties campaign has been no different.

For those of you who attended the Tech Directors Conference in March, particularly those who took part in the Podcasting breakout group, may remember me mentioning the Flash Media Server (FMS) hosting we use for our streaming media. There are a handful of companies out there that specialize in Flash Media hosting… we use a company called Influxis.

So getting back to the Distressed Properties campaign, we produced an hour long DVD for Broker’s to share with agents. We kind of decided as an afterthought that I should prepare a streaming version of the DVD in six chapters for viewing on warealtor.org. So I went ahead and did this last week and officially published it last Thursday (5/29). We have a pretty stripped down account with Influxis that allows for a modest 40 concurrent streams.

So fast forward to Monday morning… we start getting calls from members that they are having issues watching the video. I naively open up my FMS Admin Console and immediately notice our total connections are pegged at 40! We did not anticipate the tremendous response at all! So I was immediately on the phone with Influxis upgrading our account to handle the huge demand. After a quick reboot of my Virtual Host, we were able to host 100 simultaneous streams. Quick and painless for the most part.

But demand kept increasing throughout the day yesterday and overnight so I upgraded again this morning to allow for 200 simultaneous streams! Thankfully working with FMS is pretty easy and Influxis makes upgrading your service a snap as well. It really saved us (me!) a lot of stress.

I realized if we had attempted to host the video locally on our web server it would’ve been toast! There’s just no way it would be able to keep up with demand… we use a Windows 2K3 Server which has no business streaming content! That’s the beauty of using FMS… it’s built specifically to stream Flash files. Not that you can’t host streaming Flash on a generic Linux or Windows server; it can be done but you run the risk of staring down the barrel of a serious crash. Take my word for it.

So next time your association needs to use streaming media, definitely take a look a Flash Media Server. It could save the day and save you a lot of headaches.

You can also buy the FMS software and run it locally if you are so inclined.

Do you have any experiences with Flash Media Server?

Resources:
Adobe’s Flash Media Server Page
Influxis Flash Media Hosting
Flowplayer: Flash Video Player for the Web

I must say I spend the vast majority of my day in Firefox which is probably the case for many web developer types out there. It is the de facto browser for development for a myriad of reasons… adherence to W3C standards (for the most part) being the biggest. But I think what gets me most excited about Firefox is the mind boggling array of add-ons available to developers. The foremost of which, in my opinion, is Chris Pedrick’s Web Developer Toolbar.

This add-on has so many amazing features that I will only introduce you to a few that I use regularly… ones that can save you huge amounts of time in debugging and help make your development cycle more efficient in general.

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So I know there are tons of video sharing sites out there, and even a few that are specific to real estate, but I’m going to make a shameless plug for a crew that’s local to us in Massachusetts… hey California, you’re not the only one with technology start-ups!

Check out www.zipvo.com

They are on the all-free, ad-supported model. They’ve got the features everyone loves about youtube; link-to or embed a clip on you site, etc. It’s good stuff, so if you’ve got a “tech-tips” kinda thing in your newsletter, or on you site, they might be something work checking on and informing your members about.

Yes yes, there are tons of “real estate glossaries” and other sites that define the most commonly-used real estate terms, but most of them are antiquated laundry lists cobbled together from other laundry lists. I was sent this site, RealEstateWiki.com, which is pretty interesting. It could, like so many other niche sites, fall flat on its face or just die a slow and obscure death of disuse. But it is the only site I know of that makes use of the wiki platform to create a pretty expansive glossary, FAQs, and whitepages specific to real estate. It’s the brainchild of Stefan Swanepoel, a touring real estate educator who apparently has altruistic motives for the site; it’s all free with no advertising or other fees to use. It could grow into something useful.

http://www.RealEstateWiki.com.

Google’s App Engine is cool. Really cool. It’s not a revolutionary step for them, but rather another front in their march toward true “cloud” computing. In brief, let me explain what the Apps Engine is… Google has opened up their infrastructure to any developer who wants to create and host a web app on their servers. This removes the need for a developer to pay for servers, hosting, and setup of a LAMP/XAMPP environment. In my opinion, anything that lowers the barrier to entry in the delivery of services is a great thing.

So how does this move us toward cloud computing?
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