Google launched a customized search engine interface. I thought it would be fun to see how that interface would apply to real estate. So far, I am a bit disappointed, not in Google, but in myself, as I can't seem to get it to narrow into a property specific search. For the record, I have put in about 5 minutes thus far, so that shows my patience level and the ease of this utility. Results turn up more against the site fluff (yes that is a highly technical term for web development) than the properties themselves. This is not that surprising knowing a few things about property search from the development side of things. I will leave that last line as a hint for exploration.
try it out for your self - This one was built only to index off the ‘Chicago’ sites.
One's perspective is vastly different looking into a snow globe as opposed to if we were living in the globe looking out. Unfortuntely, in the realm of CRT, we are often found looking into the snow globe and seeing a wonderful world of listings, agents, technology, harmony and bliss. In other words, we don't always appreciate the depth, balance and concerns that the industry faces in the trenches.
To gauge the industry from a technological perspective, we are going to open our inboxes up for questions, comments, insights and stories. We have created AskATech@crt.realtors.org. Dependant on the traffic, we will try to answer questions and provide comment, but more importantly, we will use this feedback to help push the CRT Blog in a 'Dear Abby' fashion.
No question is too small, and hopefully no question is too hard. gulp! So please feel free to start sending in your technology related questions, we are looking forward to hearing from you.
Why was I talking snow, I probably just jinxed Chicago for a brutal weather - Snake is going to be mad.
So many decisions needed to be made when I was first offered a position with CRT. The most notable and important was how close is there a Dunkin Donutsto the Realtor Building. That was the make or break question, and I needed to act on it stat.
Well, luckily, Google and Yahoo could come to the rescue. Using Google Maps API and Yahoo Local API I was able to search for every location, and map it accordingly. Below is a working example of what was created.
These same techniques can be used on your own website for creating utilities to map listing data in relation to local businesses and other points of interest. Thus providing your web users with much more robust and dynamic content.
If you are interested, sample code for creating this utility can be downloaded here.
Enjoy -
Expanding on what Worthy Oracle Keith said, one of the things that I am hoping to bring to CRT is my experience in the front lines of Broker/Agent technology. Working at Prudential - Chicago almost from its birth, I witnessed and implemented 3 incarnations of their network and web services. Through this, the most challenging was maintaining software and hardware that met the needs of the users, but at the same time didn't break the IT budget.
One of the reasons that the hardware/software was so challenging, was that it wasn't setup like a traditional company, where each user has their dedicated machine, and upgrades can deploy departmentally. Instead, each office had several shared workstations which dozens of agents would pass through daily. Each user works differently, has access to different software and web services on their personal machines, and relies on the branch machines to play nicely with whatever they may be working on. In other words introducing an unknown amount of variables for software and usage requirements - the greatest fear of any person in technology, the random factor.
This lends itself to an interesting topic, as 2007 is going to bring the simultaneous launch of both Microsoft Vista and Office 2007. Although Prudential had been budgeting for this upgrade for the past year and half, they had been preparing for the upgrade and getting all the pieces in place for close to 3 years prior. The key to understanding your upgrade path is to understand the business impact both in terms of financial and usability. Each companies mileage may vary with the same solution, so these factors need to be fully identified and understood. Continue reading ‘Cost Wrangling the Random Factor’
Our blog has been kinda quiet lately and for that I apologize. I plan on making sure that changes and we’re back to the regularly active blog you’ve come to love. On to the topic at hand…
Traditionally, spring is the time of renewal and rebirth, but CRT has never been one to follow some conventions. While we’ve been quiet, CRT has been in the process of what we’ve affectionately called rebooting.
5 years ago this past August, CRT was created. In the beginning CRT was just two people: Mark Lesswing and myself. Over time we added staff. As we hit our five year anniversary, Mark was promoted to NAR’s CTO. I was then asked to head up CRT and I accepted the challenge. At first, due to various staffing changes, CRT was back down to two people: myself and Ian Smith. Luckily this has changed. Continue reading ‘[root@crt ~]# shutdown -r now’
