Feeling VERY Geeky Right Now! ColdFusion 8

"No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking." - Voltaire

Max has been using that as her email tag line for years on and off - and it's true! It took some doing, but we are now 100% ColdFusion 8 across the board on all of our servers! Now, I'm sure that's not much to most of you, because, as another of Max's sayings goes, "you don't want to know how to build a watch, you just want to know what time it is!"

Yeah, but oh, the watch I'm gonna build for you with ColdFusion 8! Tooltips are just the beginning!

BEHOLD, I give you...Tooltips!

I've been playing with some updates to the current Listings Search Engine interface and added some Tooltips - the little popup balloons that show when you place your mouse over certain elements on the screen. This is the first experimentation of a new interface to the system - you'll be able to select from the current interface or a new "Web 2.0" sort of interface. Let us know what you think of the Tooltips!

Area Information and Demographics

In order to provide information in which consumers are interested, we link to some external web pages. We have done as much as possible to make sure these third-party sites don't take away from our customers' web sites. The one that we didn't have a good solution for was the Area Demographics link on the detail of a listing.

Now, I've found that Wikipedia has a pretty extensive set of information on cities and towns, and it meets the criteria of being a neutral third party without advertising that could detract. I've switched over the detail link to use Wikipedia. There are a few VERY small towns that aren't listed, but the tradeoff of no advertising seems to outweigh this. Enjoy!

Bouncing Emails, Part 2

When I wrote about email bounces before, it only included the HomeScanner Daily Updates, not the Direct Inquiry or New Registration emails. Now, we've added another process to handle those also.

It seems that, while many of our customers hadn't been taking the time to deal with Undeliverable emails, some had - it sort of threw off their own processes in response to our generated emails! So, our new process will keep you in the loop for ALL Undeliverables.

Following the Bouncing Email

More of the Education Of Bob Due To OptEmail.Net: ListingWare has maintained the database of contacts that register through the web sites of our customers from Day 1 - we've never done anything like a mass-delete of old contacts or even deactivated saved searches of contacts, even if that search were 3 years old. Right now, we've got about 3 MILLION contacts in the database, with THOUSANDS of saved searches! We've always left it up to you, our customers, to maintain the contacts' records and perform tasks such as that.

Well...we've finally had to implement the first such task ourselves. In order to maintain 'non-spammer' status with big ISPs (Comcast, AT&T, AOL, etc.) and mail providers (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo!, etc.), we've started counting the number of bounced emails to each contact. If a HomeScanner Daily Update bounces back as undeliverable we notify you of it and we increment the bounce count by one. Once that gets to 5, we will stop sending emails to that contact only. Their login on your service will remain active and you can 'un-bounce' them from their contact record detail page.

This does take a burden off of you, as well as making sure we stay in the Internet's good graces. So, just keep this in mind - YOU do have some burden in making sure our service operates smoothly, but we're trying to make it as easy as possible!

Long Awaited Function - Export Contacts!

This is probably the feature that has been requested for the LONGEST time! Good things come to those...you know. Anyhow, it's finally here. When you go to the Visitors section of the Account Manager, there is now a link under the Contact Manager that says Export Contacts. You can export in either an Excel-compatible or tab-delimited format.

The main push for this to finally arrive is that we've launched the Public Beta of OptEmail.Net - and wouldn't you know that one of the first five people to signup had 3,000+ ListingWare contacts?!?! I had written a web-based synchronization, but it took several minutes to complete, which wouldn't cut it for the plans we have for OptEmail.Net. So, there you go - necessity is the mother of...you know that, too.

Another New Gadget!

I'm just going crazy with new gadgets now! If you look at the top-center of our web site there is now an Online Chat button in case you need to get in touch with us. As with phone and email, we'll be glad to assist!

Email Alchemy

In getting ready to launch OptEmail.Net, I've had to educate myself on exactly what it takes to achieve maximum deliverability with email. It's definitely a combination of art and science! Stuff doesn't just automagically happen, people!

I'm also applying what I've learned to ListingWare, since we have such a massive amount of email to deliver on a daily basis. You may see a few changes, such as the FROM EMAIL on emails from your ListingWare service saying something like 'emailupdates@homescanner.net'. The FROM NAME will still say your name, and the REPLY EMAIL will still be yours. It's got to do with things like SPF, SenderID, Black Hole Lists, Return Path,...even MY head was spinning learning this.

Bottom line is that more email should be able to get directly to its destination. How's that for automagic!

OptEmail.Net

Ooooh, it's so close I can almost taste it! Mmmm...New Code! I'm talking about how close I am to turning OptEmail.Net loose on the world - it's going to kick butt!

Everyone has been asking for drip marketing/permission marketing/email campaign thingy for a LONG time. And it's been in development for a LONG time - and hopefully, it will be worth it! I'll put out more VERY soon!

Let There Be Mac!

And it was good! For years I've been a Windows geek, dabbling in Unix. On the other side of the technology spectrum is my better half, Max - better half in marriage and business. And I'm not trying to put her down, but she's always the one who says "I don't want to know how to build the watch, I just want to know what time it is!" That's her way of saying the technology doesn't mean anything to her, she just wants it to work.

So, after endless frustration over the last couple of years with how two different Windows laptops worked for her (or didn't work, to be precise), we broke down and got her a MacBook Pro. What a nice system! I'm just cutting my teeth on it, but I can already tell it's easier for ANYONE to use. I'm going to tinker with it, but I know I won't be allowed to take it over! Now that so much of what everyone does on a daily basis is Internet-oriented, I'm sure it will be just as good as I've heard.

New Registration Options

We got a suggestion from a new user on two options for QuantumLead registrations: 1) Being able to have less than Name, Phone, and Email required for entry and 2) Being able to not show the Password field. Both of these sounded great - it would be nice if only the email field were required, for example. Registration would be VERY quick and users might not feel like their privacy is being invaded. We're testing it and will let you know.

DreamHomeTour.com

For at least the last 4 years, ListingWare has been hosting the technology services for a company named DreamHomeTour.com. Some of you may have only become aware of ListingWare's existence because your web site had been shut down because ListingWare was no longer in partnership with DreamHomeTour. It's unfortunate that we had to take this step, but it was unavoidable. We are working with everyone that contacts us to get their services operational again as soon as possible, with the least amount of pain. Please bear with us - and if you've already switched over to ListingWare, welcome aboard!

The Mail Must Go Through

Last evening, we started the first test of the new server's capabilities by giving it the job of delivering outbound email traffic from ListingWare. This includes all of the emails generated by inquiries through web site visitors clicking on a listing they like, visitors who register, and such. Today, it's also including the HomeScanner daily email updates generated from Saved Searches. So far, it seems to be up to the task!

The Eagle Has Landed...

The new server is now safe and sound in its new home. We have quite a few servers located in different hosting facilities, but most of our operations are being consolidated to Quality Technology Services and their data center in Suwanee, GA. I was even going to take some pictures and show you our hardware, but the data center actually has pretty tight security on that! But, you can take a look at the link for Quality to get an idea - our cabinet is just about at the left edge of the photo showing the data center floor...

Yes, I'm actually telling you that ours is just one of those phone-booth-sized cabinets. I've seen other companies in a variety of industries that will try and give the impression that they actually own a HUGE data center for the services they provide. It's not really like that - companies like ours, as well as many companies MUCH bigger than ListingWare use these "carrier-class" data centers because that is where their expertise lies, where ours is in creating web applications as plugins to your web sites.

My intent here is just to let you know that a LOT of thought went into picking a good home for your service.

The Head Geek Is All Excited!

Do you remember the scene in Ghostbusters where Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Harold Ramis are going up in the elevator to catch their first ghost? They turned on the "unlicensed nuclear accelerator" pack for the first time - the SOUND that thing made?!?! Well, that's what it sounded like the first time I turned on our new primary server that just came in! I had joked that it was a "fire-breather", but didn't realize how right I was!

Joking aside, we're putting it online now and will be porting all of the primary databases and web sites (like the main ListingWare web site) over to it during the next month. You should start to see some of those improvements very soon!

New Stuff Coming

Last week, Craig and I attended the Showcase 2007 event here in Atlanta for the Atlanta Board of Realtors and FMLS. They do put on quite a show! As always, it was good to see existing customers and nice to talk to new and potential ones.

Two of the things that we heard are things we've also heard before (paraphrasing slightly): "Love your service, but you're tough to get on the phone" and "Love your service, but sometimes the Account Manager is slow".

So, here's what we're doing to remedy those: we've got a couple of new Support personnel that started this week (Joe Ranieri and Danielle Paulet). Also, we're going to be replacing our primary web and database server that drives our main web site (the Account Manager) and holds all of the setting information for all ListingWare services. That server is already in-route - fun to watch the FedEx tracking page online for updates!

ListingWare Blog, Take 2

Well, I'm finally back with this! I had so much going on over the late spring and summer that this hasn't been kept up, but I'm going to start up fresh because I'm excited about what's going on!

As you can see, there have been several changes with ListingWare lately. We've changed the design of the home page and the Account Manager a little - really just to enable some of the other changes that we've been making. Make sure you check on the Reports section in your Account Manager for some significant additions.

Also, I've FINALLY been able to get the recorded webinar for the API online. You can find a link to that on Bob's Geek Corner and under the Support section of our web site.

ListingWare API Follow-up

Today we had the webinar for the ListingWare API. Seems like it went well for the most part; lots of ground covered, many good questions. I'll try to publish it as soon as I can.

I say "for the most part" because we were trying to do something with Skype called a Skypecast to get the audio online without requiring a long-distance phone call for attendees. Well, that didn't go so well...suffice it to say, I'm NOT going to be using that again until Skype works the kinks out of the Private Skypecasts! Hopefully, you weren't still the phone call at the end when I let off a little steam from my frustration with Skype...OOPS! Sorry if you heard that...

Next Webinar: ListingWare API

I sent out the announcement today about our next webinar on Wednesday, April 25th. We'll be covering the ListingWare API, which is the handy thingy that lets you create all sorts of custom searches, results and special links for your IDX search. As far as we can tell, it's also EXCLUSIVE to ListingWare!

One of the pieces of feedback from the first webinar was that people didn't like having to dial a long-distance phone number in order to hear the audio. Well, that is one way we can keep costs down - it can get VERY expensive to host a toll-free conference like that. However, we're going to try something next Wednesday: Skype has a new feature called Skypecast. It lets you stream audio via their system for up to 100 people. So, we'll have the standard webinar, with the regular phone portion for audio that you can dial in to, as well has having the Skypecast for the first 100 people. If you don't have Skype yet, you can get it at http://www.skype.com.

In order for me to do all of this, I'm going to have to wear TWO headsets until we find something better to do! One standard phone headset and then a USB headset hooked up to the computer! I bet I'll look ready to communicate with Mars!

Our First Webinar!

We're all grown up now! Wow! What a turnout! We had our first-ever webinar today via GoToWebinar. (Excellent system, great price, by the way). We had about 80 people turn up on fairly short notice: we had been planning on starting this sort of online seminar (or webinar, as they call it; weird word, but it's descriptive). The short notice was because we were able to get a free trial of the webinar portion of the service - I think it worked out well, so we should stick with it! (About the only real negative we heard was that the audience had to pay for a long distance call to hear the audio live - not THAT expensive, but something. We'll see what we can do about that, too.)

For any of you that have been with ListingWare for a few years, you may remember our Lunch-and-Learns - same concept with the webinars, but it will be a lot easier for us to keep up a schedule. We'll put out a schedule very soon as to how we move forward - what the next subjects are, what day(s) we'll be having them, etc., so everyone will be able to plan to be a part.

I've already posted the first one in the LW Account Manager - it's in a link on the upper-right section of the main page when you login.

And I KNOW that I sound like a bit of a hick - I am, after all, from Alabama! But I'm good with that!