| LED Digest 2124: Real Estate Databases |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. March 24, 2006 Issue #2124 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Javascript Comeback in AJAX ==-- ~ Lori Smart ~ Tom Aman --== Real Estate Databases ==-- ~ Sarah Hayes ~ Chris Nielsen --== Dealing with Blog Spam ==-- ~ Steven Rothberg --== To Bounce or Not To Bounce ==-- ~ Brian Rideout ~ Don Baker ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Have I Been Scammed? ==-- ~ Bev Hanna --== Sites for Mobiles ==-- ~ Rose Lacy ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Lori Smart Subject: Javascript AJAX > Would like to know fellow LEDers opinion on the > usage of AJAX in websites and it's disadvantages. - Viggie Bala, LED 2123 Hi Viggie, I've been a long time lurker here, leaving the posting to my business partner / husband. However, this is an area where I'm very interested in sharing my views. I'd like to first address your final question, then get back to what we do about Javascript. I've looked into AJAX, as we love & use Google maps for absolutely everything! I'm excited about the possibilities it offers. At the same time, I'm a huge supporter of the WAI (http://www.w3.org/WAI/) and making sites accessible to all. It seems that the functions of AJAX strongly rely on the GUI, which would really hinder alternative browsers and browser add-ins that help the disabled to access a web page. Having said that, I will still play around with it and see what else it can do. There are many ways to provide alternate content and I'm sure that work-arounds will be found. I say we play with it, find it's strengths and weaknesses and we'll be ready if it becomes the 'next big thing'! As for the Javascript issues & some SEO opinions, I've never really seen proof that it's a problem for search engine ranking. We have many clients in top 10 searches using Javascript drop down menus. We start with a button or text link and use the drop down for very organized sub-menus. Then, in each of the sub-menu areas, we have text or button links to each of the same-area links. So if someone cannot access the drop down menus, they can still easily navigate the site, and spiders can easily get to every page we want crawled. Another factor is that instead of tons of code on each page of the site, we link to the scripts as an external file as we do with CSS. And to add my 2c about another debate going on with file naming, we definitely find our clients' top 10 in Google are invariably the same sites that have used relevant key words in the file structure such as site.com/widgets/squarewidget.html and our ecommerce system automatically creates pages in this way as you build your product catalog. The 'experts' can say what they want but the proof is in the first page listings! Lori Smart Internet Design http://www.internetdesign.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Tom Aman Subject: Javascript AJAX > We do remember the old usability dictum: links must be blue & underlined etc., but we have come a long way and the layperson is also catching up. The current crop of mobile phones crammed so many menus & features using the same no. of buttons as available 5 years ago. And the average non-technical layperson seems to catch up. - Viggie Bala, LED 2123 Sorry, but I disagree with you. The non-technical layperson will NEVER catch up (in some cases, they are more apt to give up). They will just continue to be confused. It is a real education to watch a relative new comer to Web surfing attempt to navigate some sites. I am a technical non-layperson and I often encounter sites where navigation is non-apparent and/or difficult to figure out. ("I know I saw it on this site somewhere but I can't figure out how to get back to the page!") Navigation on a Web page and within a site should ALWAYS be simple and obvious - the blue and underlined, changing color when visited is still the best. Javascript and Flash and other non-standard navigation, including drop-down menus, just makes navigation more confusing and non-obvious. My wife, who has now been surfing the Web for two or three year, still has serious problems using drop-down menus. As for mobile (cell) phones having become more and more crammed with menus and features using the same number of buttons, again the average non-technical layperson is not catching up. Neither is the technical non-layperson. They just never use most of the features since they have no idea where to find them, how to set them and / or what they mean. In fact, most users (myself included) do not and never will need most of these features. I carry my cell phone for emergencies so I can be contacted while I am out, so I can stay in touch with home, or so I can call for help (like the automobile club) if I need it. My son carries one for the same reason, so does my daughter-in-law, so does my daughter, so does my other son. None of us are interested in text messaging, browsing the Web from the phone, etc., etc. None of us need most of the other fancy features, so all it means is that we are forced to pay a premium price for stuff we will never need. All that I and most people really need is a basic phone to make and receive calls, possibly with a means of storing commonly called numbers. But just try and find such a simple phone! Tom Aman Aman Software http://www.cyberspyder.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Sarah Hayes Subject: Real estate database > Wondering if anyone out there has any ideas > about where I might find a database suitable > for Real Estate / Property Rental Listings. - Paul Dobie, LED 2123 Hi Paul, There are a couple of open source and low cost solutions that should do just want you want. I have used both with my preference being for the Mambo and Hot Property option. 1. Open Realty (www.openrealty.org) is open source software and has been around for many years. Open Realty will require a little more server side experience to get up and running and to customise the look of the pages, but the installation instructions are easy to follow. 2. Mambo (open source) (www.mamboserver.com) and the Hot Property (www.mosets.com) add-on component (cost less than 100 pounds) I use Mambo a fair amount these days and Hot Property is a component that has been developed for Mambo and Joomla so it is fully integrated. You can also use Open Realty with Mambo but it isn't fully integrated. With Hot Property you can provide RSS feeds of the latest properties. It is also easy to customise if you want to sell cars instead of houses. Once you have Mambo up and running it will take a matter of minutes to install Hot Property and you're ready to go. Mambo has a great community and support forum so if you have any problems you should be able to find someone who can help you very quickly. Best regards, Sarah Hayes www.bromleynet.co.uk -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Chris Nielsen Subject: Real estate database I just found this product yesterday and it may or may not suit your needs, but it's an open source application: Open-RealtyTM is free web based listing management application. It is intended to be both easy to setup and use. Written in PHP, Open-RealtyTM is designed to be a fast and flexible tool for your website. http://www.open-realty.org/ I have a real estate site myself and intend to install it and see if it works for what I want. They have a demo and I thought it looked quite good. Thank you, Chris Nielsen Downtown Minneapolis Condos http://www.river-towers.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Steven Rothberg Subject: Blog spam > Recently my client started using B2Evolution > for her blog. She is spending about half an > hour to 45 minutes every day deleting bogus > comments / links... - Joanne Glasspoole, LED 2122 We purchased software from Movable Type for our blogs. We had dozens of trackbacks posted the first day that we launched our first blog. Great news, right? Wrong. They were all from porn and on-line gambling sites and had absolutely nothing to do with our entries. Within hours we had deleted the trackbacks and then permanently turned that feature off. Trackbacks remind me of some reciprocal linking pages that existed in the mid-1990's. You could go to another site, enter your site information, and that site would then link to you. These existed on "real" sites, not just FFA (Free For All) linking farms. These linking disappeared pretty quickly when the porn and other such sites polluted them. For the life of me, I cannot understand how an owner of a web site would want to allow unknown third parties to create links from the owner's web site to the third party's web site unless the owner of the web site has prior knowledge of the link and consents to it. Otherwise, you're turning over the keys to your site to third parties whose motives are often going to be less than pure. Steven Rothberg CollegeRecruiter.com career site -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Brian Rideout Subject: Bouncing Spam... > We all get spammed, some worse than others. On > a slow day I get 10,000, on a busy day, it hits almost > 20,000... Should I start bouncing these e-mails...? - Scott Marino, LED 2121 One thing that didn't get mentioned on the topic of bouncing spam back to the sender is that many spammers forge or pretend to be a legitimate user. I've been a victim of this type of forging and when the spammer sends 5,000 messages out 100's will fail because the target e-mail accounts no longer exist. I then get 100's of delivery errors because he had pretended to send the messages out using my e-mail address. Bouncing messages would also send those back to me... not the spammer. Just deleting them is the right approach. Other readers have commented that using a spam filtering software is effective and the right ones truly can be, eliminating sometimes hours of work dealing with spam. Brian Rideout, President BKR Studio Inc. http://www.bkrstudio.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Donald Baker Subject: Bouncing I used the bounce feature with McAfee SpamKiller, but I never noticed any difference in incoming spam. I liked SK cuz it scanned all emails on the server, and deleted any spams before they were downloaded. I finally ditched SK, tho, due to bugginess (and disgust with how McAfee products tend to take over your registry). I thought of using the bluesecurity.com program someone else suggested -- it looks like a great way to lower incoming spam while making some "blows against the empire." However, right now I'm happily using Cloudmark, which connects users with its worldwide community to flag all incoming spam. CM drops ID'd spams into a "Spam" folder in Outlook Express or Outlook; I can scan them quickly and retrieve false positives. (There's a whitelist function, too.) When incoming spams get past the Cloudmark filter, I highlight them and click a "Block Spam" button (added to my OE interface). Those msgs are sent to the Spam folder, plus the CM community gets informed as well. I quickly scan the Spam folder a couple times a day, and then delete it. One interesting feature, designed to defeat spammers gaming the system, is that as users participate in the CM system, their reliability factor is calculated -- if I quickly and accurately flag new spams, my reliability rating goes up. But if I tell the system that obvious spams should be "unblocked," then my reliability goes down - I guess if it get low enough, I'll be banished, or something. I achieved the highest reliability ranking in only a few months of using CM every day. (My antivirus program has caught a few malwares in incoming msgs dumped in the Spam folder, but on the whole the incoming spam has been free from viruses, trojans, etc, which surprised me.) CM costs about $40/yr, and I've found it well worth it. Here's a link -- the affiliate portion gives me free months for anyone signing up through the coded link. Feel free to keep it or cut it out. http://www.cloudmark.com/?rc=xc4g4 Don Baker NSI Partners ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Bev Hanna Subject: Scam My thanks to the people who replied to my query regarding the situation with my credit card. In the final analysis, and on the advice of my lawyer who pointed out that it would probably cost more in legal fees than I'd ever get back since I live in Canada and cross- border litigation would be prohibitive, I decided to go ahead and work with the program I'd signed for. Given that I'm not well-versed in e-commerce, even if I get only basic training I'll be further ahead than before, and if they do live up to their claims I should easily be able to make back what I paid out within the first year. As for further costs, since I no longer have a credit card, I will get what I can from the information provided and, when the time is right, make better-informed decisions. Once burned, twice shy, right? Bev Hanna, S.C.A. http://www.bevhanna.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Rose Lacy Subject: Mobiles Hello Tim Mullen and others interested in the mobile web, > Where is a resource for just the basics? I got my information from a bunch of different sources, mainly http://www.w3schools.com/wap/ , http://www.wapforum.org/ , and http://www.w3.org/Mobile/ . A free developer kit is available from Nokia. > Are there reliable PDA user / usage statistics? Not sure, but is seeing everyone you know with a PDA or web cell phone reliable enough? > Can we brainstorm alternative design ideas?... Clean HTML will display on most new phones. Last year's Nokias and T616s will only display WML. WML is easy to learn. The short way is to replace all your <.p> tags with <.card> and add links to the next <.card>. The head tags are different, and you'll have to set a RewriteCond in your .htaccess to redirect to your wml page. > P.S. One friend's site I wish to experiment with is > http://displayhq.com If it's understandable without a style sheet or graphics, then it might be okay. Long pages will have slow load times. Rose Lacy http://webrosedesign.com/ ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains © Copyright 1995-2006 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. "He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home." - Johann von Goethe |
