My Side Door

Ok, this is a bit of a rant, so my apologies up front.  But a month or so back I bought a new Canon SD870is Digital Elph to use as my general all-around blogging camera.  I wanted something that was small enough to put in my pocket almost every where I went, but with the best quality of photo I could get for the size.  The 870 is a bit bigger than my Razr, but not much, so the size was right, and with the image stabilization, it really takes some great photos.

So yesterday, when I whipped it out to find it wasn’t working, dang I was bummed.  The camera won’t focus at all in the wider angles, about 3/4 of the way through the zoom you can make out a camera phone quality fuzzy image, but any further zooming and again, there’s non focus.  Some thing is jammed in the focusing motor, and all the messing with it and banging of it I’ve done hasn’t helped.  So I’m going to have to send it back, and endure the hassle of dealing with an online retailer’s customer service.  Ugh.

Anyway, until it broke (inexplicably I might add…I don’t recall dropping it since I last used it on Halloween), I did like the camera, and I expect it’s replacement to do well for its intended purpose.

Today was an amazing day.  My real estate blog received some tremendous reactions over an article I wrote about Trulia Voices.  The CEO of Trulia stopped by and commented later that day.  Today, I wrote another article about Trulia Voices, and got another visit from the CEO of Trulia.  And all of the hits on the blog caused it to really skyrocket in the stats category, which I couldn’t be happier about.

While that fun was taking place, I had coffee at Starbucks with an agent that’s agreed to office at my satellite.  That’s really good news, as we need more agents, especially since I let one go, while at the same time a client that was renting half of my office space moved out when he found a commercial lease that worked for him.  So the office has been a bit quiet the last couple of weeks.

And then back at the office, In my inbox, a client prospect sent me an email requesting to look at homes to buy on November 5th and 5th.

So when Shelly from the Wall Street Journal called today, as the big “capper” you can’t imagine my elation.  She led out by saying that she’d seen what I had written on my blog, and the reaction from Pete Flint, the CEO of Trulia, and wanted to ask some more follow-up questions.  I’m not sure our discussion added much to her story, but I did stress an important point: 

When the content at Trulia becomes consistently high quality, I’ll want to be a part of it.

The low quality of the content is my beef with it today, and it looks like the folks at Trulia listened and are planning to do something about it next week.  Kudos to them.

But back to the cool factor…I was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal.  Sheesh, how cool was that?  Jan remarked that I haven’t attended any media training.  She’s wondering if I made ”the company” look bad.   If so, oh well.  Most likely is I botched it up enough that the Journal never references me in whatever article they are planning to run (Shelly said it was something about Web 2.0).

Anyway, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, here at My Side Door, I’ll probably always post in flurries.  That’s another reason to subscribe.  If you don’t have a feed reader, Google has a good one.  Then you don’t need to ping the site to find out if I’ve posted, your feed reader will alert you automagically.

Happy Belated Halloween.

I wrote about a new domain name for the Phoenix Area Real Estate blog a while back, but unfortunately, the name I was hoping to get at the time was renewed for 2 years by the current owner, just days before it was set to expire.  It’s unfortunate, because there isn’t a website using the domain name, which has been the case for the last 10 years.  You’d think by now the owner would have done something with it.  Bah…no sense crying over spoiled milk.

At any rate, I did a quick survey with 8 choices, and the domain name www.RealPhoenixLiving.com was definitely the crowd favorite.  Not everyone’s #1 choice, but in almost everyone’s top 3.  So that name won, and today I renamed the real estate blog.  Google hates the new blog now, but that’s ok.  In less than a month Google will be stopping by once a day or so again, and in 3 months Google will be back to the multiple visits per day I’ve grown to enjoy.  In less than 3 months, the blog earned a page rank of 4, which is phenominal.  I hope I can get back to taht level a bit quicker, especially because I know some of the tricks that got me there.  Well, not tricks really, just things to do right.

WordPress is the software for this blogging platform.  They released their latest version 9 days ago, and I naturally waited for the more experienced bloggers to do the upgrade before I ventured into the craziness.  I figured let someone else be the guinea pigs.  Well, there were enough posts about it for me to get a feel for what to look out for, so I’m giving it a shot.

First I saved off my private content, which turned out to be super easy, with the database backup plug-in that I have.   Then I de-activated all of my plug-ins.  Then I downloaded the new upgraded onto the server, and overwrote my wordpress installation with the new files.  I was supposed to delete everything first, but that seemed a tad risky…I don’t like deleting if I don’t have to. 

Next, I ran the upgrade script which took less than a second.  In fact it was so fast, I thought for sure something didn’t work.  From there, I went back to the plug-ins page and sure enough, I could see one new feature work right away, the plug-ins upgrade alerter.  I got busy downloading all of the upgraded plug-ins, and activating everything that was active before.

As a test I wrote a test post, which immediately failed with this error:

WordPress database error: [Table 'wordpress.wpsteve_categories' doesn't exist]
SELECT c.cat_ID AS ID, MAX(p.post_modified) AS last_mod FROM `wpsteve_categories` c, `wpsteve_post2cat` pc, `wpsteve_posts` p WHERE pc.category_id = c.cat_ID AND p.ID = pc.post_id AND p.post_status = 'publish' AND p.post_type='post' GROUP BY c.cat_id

Ugh. That’s not what I was hoping for.  I went to the WordPress’ release notes, which stated that the categories table was removed.  This meant the offensive code above surely must have been a plug-in that hadn’t upgraded.  I decided to turn off my 2 sitemap plug-ins, because neither had an available upgrade, and sure enough, I can now save without error.  Now I just need to get a new auto-sitemap generator.

Otherwise, it all looks good.  As a result of the upgrade, I’m finally going to get around to implementing tags, since that was the #1 new feature of WordPress 2.3, while before you needed a plug-in to get tag support.

Update: The Google Sitemap-XML Plug-in that was giving me grief was updated by the author today.  I’ve downloaded the new version of the plug-in and it seems to be working as exptected.  Nice work.  I think this basically gets me back to even, and only in about an hour.  Not bad, really.

Friday night I sat on the roof of the office and shot photos for 45 minutes as the sun went down.  Then I doctored and toyed with them, and finally selected this image for the new banner image on the real estate blog:

What do you think?

If you are at all interested in what’s going on at Interbike this year, the guys at Speedgoat have got a spectacular blog running this year.  I’m subscribed to their blog, and have been blown away with all of the great industry info they’ve been publishing.  I think I’m most interested in more news about the new Pivot, which is a new bike built by Chris Cocalis formerly of Titus.  Since I ride a Titus Racer-X, custom designed by Chris himself, what he’s doing with the Pivot has definitely caught my attention.

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I owe a number of excellent blogging tips to Dave Smith and his all too useful blog.  To that end, Dave’s blog is the first addition to my blogroll.

Since launching 101bell.com, I’ve been plagued by a frustrating problem with outages.  The server wouldn’t be down, but the outside world wouldn’t be able to get to the website.  Then I launched the Phoenix Area Real Estate Blog, and the problem didn’t get worse, but the impact of the problem became more concerning for me.

What was frustrating, is that outages always seemed to occur on Saturday or Sunday, and there didn’t seem to be a cause.  Last Saturday it again seemed to go “down” (again, the server was up and running, it just didn’t seem to respond), and I became determined to figure out what was wrong.  Working from home, I logged into 101bell.net (which is a Windows Server), and from there logged into the server for 101bell.com.   101bell.com’s server is named azul, and it’s a Linux server. 

I use the latest Debian release, which made installation a snap, and has made finding new software as well as updating existing software on the server equally easy.  Easy for a Linux box, that is.  It still takes some “skills”.  And whatever was causing this outage seemed most likely to be a configuration issue with Azul.

So I looked closely at the basic network configuration.  Azul has 2 network cards.  One that sees the outside world (aka the internet) and one that sees the local network (intranet).  I noticed that one of Azul’s DNS servers was 101bell.net.  Although not a horrible setting, it’s not what I wanted as my T1 provider has perfectly good DNS servers that I’d prefer to use.  I also noticed that when I did a traceroute to trace the IP traffic from Azul to an internet server (like google.com), that the route always went through 101bell.net. 

That was certainly not right.  Why was Azul not using the other network port and going directly out to the internet?  Finally, I looked at my /etc/network/interfaces file and closely examined the configuration there.  And sure enough, there it was as the first route to try:  101bell.net as a gateway.  So I removed this entry from /etc/network/interfaces, and whala! the server really seems to be responding better now.

Although I was never really ever able to explain why it worked most of the time, but not all of the time, it has now worked all of the time for the past 48 hours.  Google keeps track of unreachable links, and as of right now all links for all of the websites are up.  I also noticed that 101bell.net has fewer network errors in it’s logs.   So while my configuration still might not be perfect, it seems to be better.

Of course, I don’t expect anyone reading this to understand I’ve just written, but hopefully you’ll appreciate what a hassle hosting your own server can be.  There’s a lot of times when I think, “For $50/month Godaddy.com would be happy to host my server for me.”  One day I hope that my blogs will be so busy that I’ll need to move to Godaddy, just to keep up with the traffic.  But for now, I’m building up my experience the hard way, so that when and if I need to move to Godaddy, I’ll at least know what my requirements are, which I couldn’t even say 6 months ago.

If you want to be successful with your on-line presence you have no choice but to accept the reality that you owe any chance of success to how much Google likes your website, and thus how high it ranks your site in its search results.  Yahoo and MSN and Ask and all the rest make up less than half of total search engine searches, so it’s just the nature of the beast that the beast that is Google must be tamed.

Blogging, if done well, can be used to effectively tame Google.  You must blog frequently, you must have people that read and refer to your site, you must refer to other sites, and you must provide unique content.  This week I posted a small article about the Phoenix Walk for PKD.  PKD is a kydney disease that fellow REALTOR Joanne Bradley is afflicted with.  She recently made me aware of the walk.  FYI, It’s over at DC Ranch on Saturday, September 15th, if you are interested.

But the point of this post is about Google and searching.  I posted the entry on September 4th.  Google crawled my site on September 4th, as well.  And right now, if you do a Google search for “Phoenix Walk PKD”, my blog entry is #1 as a result.  In fact, I’ve had 5 blog hits in the last 2 days directly as a result of that article.

Now, 5 hits isn’t earth shattering, but what is amazing is finding myself #1 on any Google search.  That’s the first time ever for me with Google.  So thank you Google.  If you’re listening, can you hook me up with some more keywords?  How about, “Scottsdale Homes for Sale”?

It’s time I claimed my blog with Technorati.

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