Feed

  • Benchmarking Beta

    google analytics benchmarking
    (this site over the last 30 days)
    Google Analytics released a beta version of something they call benchmarking… it’s good. I hear all the time.. my site got x number of hits, and i say to myself..”what kind of hits” because what most people don’t understand is that a lot of internet traffic is automated (machines) and that only a unique visit or return visit with any substantial amount of time .. over a couple minutes, is really a valuable visitor… and everything else, i would consider spam. What benchmarking allows you to see with benchmarking is how your site stacks up traffic wise to similar sites. I imagine that level headed google style data is at play here.. it would only do them an injustice if the data was impartial in any way. Analytics is also now providing a way for you to compare timelines on a single graph.. which as they put it “may put you in a good position to ask for a raise”…but if you really want to know what’s going on with your servers… get a host with a license for urchin that will give you a much more detailed analysis.
    google analytics

    And if you want a grand piano that plays itself on real parts with Linux built in….
    digital piano
    and this is a bit from AdTech:08 san fran… on what corporate companies need to know about online advertising… pulled from vallywag’s “facebook needs to pack the crack pipe for madison avenue”

  • Postgres Python update..

    Python 2.5.2, Postgres 8.3.1, and Django .96
    django python
    python 2.5
    django python
    i’ve been playing around again with python today… i went ahead and upgraded my postgresql and python on my machine… nothing too tough, although i spent an hour going in loops until i realize that the some of the python scripts were not in usr/local/bin as i always say.. if i’d only read the actual install.txt file before i started hacking away..
    django admin.py
    i also ran into a problem with psycopg.. tring tring suggested using macports for ver2.. as configuration can be tricky modifying the config for psycopg(PostgreSQL database adapter)
    psycopg is different from the other database adapter because it was designed
    for heavily multi-threaded applications that create and destroy lots of
    cursors and make a conspicuous number of concurrent INSERTs or UPDATEs.
    Every open Python connection keeps a pool of real (UNIX or TCP/IP) connections
    to the database. Every time a new cursor is created, a new connection does not
    need to be opened; instead one of the unused connections from the pool is
    used. That makes psycopg very fast in typical client-server applications that
    create a servicing thread every time a client request arrives. (**this has something to do with news organizations using ellington) or Django/Python setup with postgres.
    Common problems while building psycopg:
    1/ if your compiler does not find some postgres headers try copying all the
    headers from the postgres _source_ distribution to a single place. Also,
    if building postgresql from source, make sure to install all headers by
    the “make install-all-headers” target.
    2/ if you have the same problem with mx.DateTime, try using the source
    directory again; the install script does not copy all the headers, same
    way as postgres install procedure does.
    3/ under MacOS X you may need to run the runlib program on the posgres
    installed libraries before trying to compile psycopg. Also, if you
    get compilation errors there is a change your python was not compiled
    correctly and psycopg is grabbing the wrong compile-time options from
    python’s Makefile. try setting the OPT and LDFLAG environment variables
    to something usefull…
    i can confirm that this works.

  • Turbo Tax

    turbo tax
    I think i can endorse it…i’m certainly not an accountant or tax expert, but i like knowing exactly how it works vs. paying someone so i don’t have to think about it. i have very little expenses and most of my work is freelance (services) with only some depreciation on computers and cameras.. i drive a good deal and it seems that turbo tax is picking up on all of these things and often double checking. I’m pretty pleased that it sync-ed up with quickbooks and was easy to use… now if i could just find a way to spend less time in quickbooks and more time with design and code… that might help. It seems business is 40% business stuff work (invoicing, emails, meetings, collecting, consulting, phone, paying bills, taxes, and other fluff) and 60% is actual work or services that you provide on a day to day basis. turbo tax

    = $0 ..or at least it feels like it.. now if only that government cash incentive was actually enough for me to catch up on my american express account… because right now my 30 year mortgage looks like a life sentence from Lehman Brothers bank. I’m of a school of thought much closer to the the fellow I met yesterday.. Mr Magwood, he called a couple days ago came out yesterday to cut bamboo because (the magwoods are old line fisherman around these parts and could swing a machete like no other seventy year old i’ve met. ) they’ve found that bamboo works as a great for clam and oyster beds.. it holds up in the water much longer than other wood like pine. I gladly trade it for the overall maintenance of the bamboo.. which i might add is quite a bit with near an acre of it… and I always get oysters, clam, fish and crab to boot.. when mentioning i’d been here six years he says “i bought a house back when on sullivans island for $50,ooo and kept it up all my life. i didn’t want to owe anyone anything so i worked it off over the years and it gave me just enough to retire”.
    **tech side note: Textmate works great for finding payments from downloadable csv statements.
    american express

  • WordPress 2.5

    wordpress


    The latest stable release of WordPress (Version 2.5) is now available. WordPress.com hosts 2.7 million WordPress blogs…and in honor of that i put up my own little space on wordpress. Let’s put wordpress into perspective for those of you who don’t understand cms (content managment systems), databases, blogs etc… it’s like this.. a database is like an excel spreadsheet (oracle, berkleydb, mysql).. and an easy way to make content dynamic on a page is to pull the database content into the webpage with a variety of scripting languages (wp uses php) so that no content or data is actually coded into the application but rather is pulled from the database. This makes it easy to update using an interface for text images, video and data etc.. here’s the six toothless kid explaining it… and my overview since i’ve run the beta for several months now…. faster, cleaner, dashboard widgets like stats, image/gallery manager with api’s, almost the same table layout, more simple/full screen wysiwyg editor, multi file uploader with progress bar, secure cookies, and faster databases.

  • Jeff Sells Charleston

    jeff dail
    To wrap up the week before Ginny and I have to run down to Savannah for a wedding I’ll drop another case study on you. Jeff Dail is a great guy with a house full of young’ns.. even though he is originally from North Carolina (we won’t hold that against him) Jeff has been selling real estate for the last umpteen years on the side while working in neo-natal departments at hospitals. (might be why he has a house full) I had done some home tours for him a couple years ago. He primarily helps his neighbors out in Hamlin Plantation in Mt Pleasant by giving them 4% brokerage rates to list their homes and he came to me recently after I had put up a multi-user site for another brokerage.
    trident real estate
    Jeff is not unlike 90% or realtors out there.. he has had several websites mostly through companies like advanced access where he paid monthly fees in the range of $30-$250 a month for sites and virtual tours and has gotten little results. I told him the same thing that I tell every client “there is no Make me money button” and you get out of it what you put into it… fancy searches, sophisticated seo results, etc… the ctar framed search works as good as any for actually generating leads and it easy to use with only and $10/month fee from ctar. People like to remain anonymous online and you’re better off generating leads at your kids soccer games than online…besides the results come from google and I already take his brokerages listing straight to google with xml files. I set him up on our grid server at media temple.. ran the domain to google apps to give him email accounts on his domain, set up thunderbird on his computers, setup his contact list (basicly like spring cleaning for email) and stopped all of his real estate spam. (priceless) I took a bunch of my old images from home tours and some new graphics and mixed it with the existing look and feel of trident real estate and gave him some print materials to work with using templates from Illustrator for brochures and letterhead. I created a way to pull his images and listings via php and another database i have on the server and way for him to create his own pages as virtual tours for his listings using wordpress and some flash galleries… the kicker to all of that stuff is that it only took me fifteen hours and i’m saving him time and money to spend with his rugrats.

    the cost: $600
    the timeline : 3 days
    the result: http://jeffsellscharleston.com

  • Fishing Lures

    fishing-lures

    this is a recent conversation with my neighbor dan wheeler.

    (me) “hey dirty, why are those chicken bones hanging on your fishing lures?” (dan) “those aren’t chicken bones… they’re alligator snapping turtle bones… you missed one hell of a stew” (me) “why are they hanging on your fishing lures?” (dan) “snapping turtle bones are what folks like howling wolf had around his neck”
    next thing i know i’m knee deep in the history of the fishing lure.

  • Easter Moodle

    easter
    easter humor…
    …and today i put up a moodle site on a server for testing and customizing… and i’ve decided to try my hand at writing a graphing plugin as my good deed for easter..
    Moodle is a free software e-learning platform (also known as a Course Management System (CMS), or Learning Management Systems (LMS), or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)). Moodle is designed to help educators create online courses with opportunities for rich interaction. Its open source license and modular design means that people can develop additional functionality.
    easter

    Personally, i like to see open source used in education.. especially since companies like blackboard pocket millions of dollars of taxpayer monies for what amounts to quite amateurish applications.. here’s a comparison of Moodle vs. Blackboard
    blackboard

    Some of the other applications that you see in schools are questionable at best.. and i don’t see how a school district could possibly trust these web enabled sql driven apps for the security of school records.
    eagle aeries

  • Fonts

    on a recent project.. i ran into some font troubles and learned some stuff along the way.. i’ve heard it again and again from various computer users… and on this particular project …when i was handed the eps files to convert to adobe flash files… there was a note that said oh.. by the way my system fonts are messed up… so i didn’t get copies of the font.. (side note: i prefer Adobe InDesign Files vs Quark or EPS files) and i used the font documented… well well.. the agency says it’s not just right. and they were right as the font i had installed as a bodega sans was actually an italian knockoff of the original that you can see here. Well this area of web design is often misunderstood and can easily bog down a work flow of a traditional print advertising agency moving to digital.. if you don’t understand fonts in websites.. here’s a quick primer just on digital fonts as the type face and font business is another beast all together where each font is copywrite to it’s founder and the foundry which produces it.
    Digital fonts store the image of each character either as a bitmap in a bitmap font, or by mathematical description of lines and curves in an outline font, also called a vector font. In terms of how your website type looks you are dealing with several ways of displaying it. System fonts represent 90% of the fonts you see in websites and are given simple css tags to define the particular system font… what sucks about them is that while you may have a particular font, another use may not and they will default to their prefered font in the browser window.. this can be uncool if the font moves you text alignment and or sizes..

    bitmaps
    * Portable Compiled Font (PCF)
    * Glyph Bitmap Distribution Format (BDF)
    * Server Normal Format (SNF)
    * DECWindows Font (DWF)
    * Sun X11/NeWS format (BF)
    * Microsoft Windows bitmapped font (FON)
    * Amiga Font, ColorFont, AnimFont
    * ByteMap Font (BMF)
    Postscript fonts – Adobe
    True Type Fonts – Apple
    Open Type Fonts – Microsoft
    Font Foundry
    * American Type Founders (Kingsley/ATF)
    * Ascender Corporation
    * Berthold
    * Elsner+Flake
    * Emigre
    * Font Bureau
    * FontFont, a division of FontShop International
    * Hoefler & Frere-Jones (H&FJ)
    * House Industries
    * Paratype
    * T26
    * URW++ (URW)

    In Flash websites the fonts can be embedded as vector so that you may vary the kind of font you are displaying
    [kml_flashembed movie=”https://davidwindham.com/media/fonts.swf” height=”600″ width=”800″ /]
    [kml_flashembed movie=”https://davidwindham.com/media/draw.swf” height=”450″ width=”800″ /]

    so this is going to end up being a very long post to summarize digital fonts so take an intermission to draw or grab some free fonts from these guys

    really nice free fonts from Eduardo Recife

    misprinted

    from and Tom Murphy who is another whole article in himself.. pls visit Tom Murphy 7’s Invincible Web Page and i was particularly amused by his Illustrated Notes from Computer Science

    tom murphy
    tom murphy

    Serif

    Here you can find a graphical version of this table.

    Sans serif

    Here you can find a graphical version of this table.

    Semiserif

    Monospaced

    Here you can find a graphical version of this table.

    Script

    Here you can find a graphical version of this table.

    [edit] Brush Scripts

    Calligraphic

    Handwriting

    Miscellaneous

     

  • Advertising and the Idiot Box

    let’s face it.. that computer screen you watching as you read this post and it’s parent network of millions of servers are full of junk and in many ways not to different than our old idiot tube. It’s all in how you use it that makes it different… and the primary difference is dynamic data. You can ask you computer questions in the form of “search” and this is why we’re seeing the shift. We aren’t only being entertained by our computers, they’ve become a invaluable communications tool for information and business, but it seems that the focus on revenue online has been entirely through advertising in one form or another. The billions spent by banks, hospitals, manufacturers and distributors on internet enabled software and applications goes mostly unpublished excepting in the trade magazines. The shift to new media for advertising dollars is getting reported everyday and i figured i’d share these tidbits with you.
    ad graph
    ad graph2
    ad share
    from silicon valley insider… see the spreadsheet data… and i believe that Newscorps MySpace will lose users and push them below Google for 2008… and this is coming from “no” valley insider or Google bull fanboy.. just the average computer user who knows that orkut or facebook are much better and less spammy than MySpace, and that Google’s search is still the fastest way to get where i think i want to go online.
    And while you may already know that Clear Channel likely owns most of your local radio stations..If you’re in South or North Carolina, you may want to note that the Mclatchy Corp owns most of our newspapers.. The State – Columbia, The Sun News – Myrtle Beach, The Herald – Rock Hill, The Beaufort Gazette, The Island Packet – Blufton Hilton Head , The Charlotte Observer, The News and Observer – Raleigh…
    youtube tive
    and on another note.. last week tivo announced that they would be adding a internet video to it’s content lineup.. no computer or equipment needed.. just the the broadband connection, the tivo box and your television… and with the advent of digital broadcasting and the federally mandated switch.. you can bet that your internet content is going to move to your tv screen without the addition of a slingbox, apple tv, or other specialized rig… Ginny and i saw a commercial recently from some pharma company on our Direct Tv Satellite.. and sure enought.. the click now button that appeared during the commercial took us to an interactive direct tv page.. it looked like crap but it had more info on the product.. and if this train stays on the track .. i should be very busy in the coming years hosting, creating and linking digital content to the traditional advertising streams, but i’d rather be playing super smash brothers… which seems so much more indicative of the idiot box i know. 🙂

    super smash brothers

  • Harbourtowne – 30th Anniversary

    Correction: 44th Anniversary

    Update: 22/01/25 – I reworked these websites this week. I’ve always promise that I’ll take care of anything that I build for the life of it. These sites were originally built in 2006 so they’re almost twenty years old now. I scaled up the images from the originals I had taken and modernized the site to accommodate 4k screen resolutions. Otherwise, it’s still basically the same with both domains running from one WordPress Multisite giving all of his agents individual sites to edit and post listings. While talking with Fudgy, he told me the previous one’s were like a Ford Model T because they were still running after all this time. It’s now his 44th Anniversary in business and I’d like to see him make 50.

    https://hbrtwn.com & https://tridentcharleston.com

    harbourtowne real estate

    Fudgy Brabham, the broker in Charge of Harbourtowne and Trident Real Estate is celebrating thirty years this year. Fudgy and I have mulled over the impact of the internet to real estate in the last three years. I met Fudgy through my father four years back when I was getting my license from CTAR in order to download data about real estate for other websites and subsequently have had my license with him since. He is a ‘larger’ than life man.. with great ideas about politics, cooking, people, and novels. I began doing home tours for real estate several years back with the spinning pictures and all :)… video, maps and all that good stuff. I burned out doing it fairly quickly but since then.. i’ve had some solid opinions about marketing properties online. It’s simple.. get your listing to look as good as possible online and get it everywhere with your name on it and then point all of your other marketing collateral there too. So we (kris and i) began syndicating real estate listing data for brokerages using a bit of rb, php, sql, and google base… we’ll, recently Fudgy and I went over the common misconceptions and problems that agents have with online marketing and I decided to see if I couldn’t tackle those for his agency.

    1) email.. how do i manage 100+ email accounts (easy dependable and inexpensively)
    2) website.. how do i manage a website (easy dependable and inexpensively) without learning to use software.. how do i add/edit pages what do i do with my current hosting and domains?
    3) some agents want to use their own websites and listing pages.. do they work? who should do them? single property websites? virtual tours? email blast?

    and voila… case study #2 in two weeks.

    the answers
    1) email.. for any size company… unless you have your own IT guys to troubleshoot and admin email accounts on your own properly configured servers with backup recovery .. don’t be dependent on some third party web hosting company who is likely dependent on another party.. ie the hosting company who admins their servers to handle your email accounts.. and while godaddy and other hosting domain companies are fine as an email host, your ISP (internet service provider) is also fine (although i find comcast, time warner and the like spammy… and what do you do when you want to switch service providers.. give up your email?) so here’s what i find works well.. I move all the dns records to google apps for domains. This solves all of those problems… it’s mobile, plays well with crackberries, it’s spam resistant and it’s easy, cheap, and dependable… and now they’ve added backup recovery from postini for the larger (legal, medical, .edu) outfits..

    login

    2)Fudgy had been using microsoft frontpage and his home brewed copy and paste html skills to edit the roster and listings online. He told me that quite frankly he wanted to spend less time doing this.. so what i did is make it so that he can import or export excel spreadsheets for his roster pages and he can copy and paste listings from ctar onto his listing pages. With WordPress controlling/editing/adding images and all that jazz isn’t in code.. it’s copy and paste.. and expanding or adding pages and features to the site doesn’t require a web development company.. just a couple minutes of his time.

    3)agent website stuff… there are a bunch of pre-fab ways to market online.. but let’s face it.. every brokerage and agent wants them leading back to their domain, url, name and logo and sending clients to www.thissite.com/somepage/someotherpage/ect.com isn’t a good practice, even though sometimes these places can work for you like google base, oodle, craigslist and vflyer… they will generate spam to your email and you should want those places generating traffic for your site and not vice versa..

    so here is what i did (don’t try this at home unless you add all of the proper precautions).. i put in a multi user wordpress install on a grid server at media temple.. i customized the back and front end, removed the bulky features, removed the wp-signup.php for security and spam reasons, added a bunch of security measures and only allowed users will emails from @hbrtwn.com, put a single sign on service to the google apps, gave every agent their own websites to control http://name.hbrtwn.com and added enough functionality so that listings can be copied and pasted into pages from ctar, galleries of images can be uploaded and put onto and page… and began a training page to teach all of these folks to use the site.

    **the best part about a multi user site instead of individual sites is that everyone who works with their webpages will actually benefit everyone else in the group search engine-wise..

    and ps… i took all of the images excepting one http://hbrtwn.com (a friend of fudgy’s took the shem creek at dusk images)

    wpapps
    wysiwyg

    The Result:
    www.hbrtwn.com
    Timeline: – exactly one week start to finish.. email addresses were up and down with no lag time or lost email. Every agent gets their own website that they can design with all the bells and whistles and multiple email addresses with less spam.. and Fudgy can spend less time on his computer.
    Price: 40hrs x $35/hr ($1400)