CRT’s communications
Pictures from about 4:30 outside the Apple store on Michigan Ave in Chicago on the day of the iPhone release. I’ll clean some of them up later, I just wanted to get them on-line while they were still relevant.
NAR employees Andrew and Chad contimplate a future purchase.
I’ve had an idea kicking around in the back of head for a few months, but not the time to write it down. As I’m currently on a flight with some time to kill, I thought I’d write an abstract of the idea for the blog to wet people’s appetites for a white paper to come soon.
In talking with realtors and developers who make use of our various RETS projects like libRETS, ezRETS, and vieleRETS it seems a majority of users are replicating the MLS database for web-based advertising purposes. Following CRT’s mission of playing with a diverse set of technology and following Perl’s Motto of “there’s more than one way to do it” I’ve been tinkering with an idea of how MLS’s can share that data in alternative ways.
Since every good project needs a catchy name that you can turn into a fun acronym, I’ve decided to call this the Syndicated Advertising-based Listings Engine or SALE. Besides, this makes promoting the project fun with catchphrases like “Everybody wants a SALE!” But what is this project you ask? Continue reading ‘Yet another data feed method or “Everybody wants a SALE!”’
We have been quiet, but not bored! The last couple weeks have been a roller coaster of excitement. We went from an internal IT strategic planning retreat (two days of food induced brainstorming) to a moving our facilities from NAR-6th floor to NAR-4th floor. Its been crazy!
With that, we needed to clean up one of CRT’s dirty little secrets, the CRT server room was a closet - seriously, the servers have all been stashed in a closet for the past 5+ years. Well, we have grown up. This week we finished rolling out 4 IBM Rackmount servers into the NAR Server Room - environmentally controlled, remote IP viewable - all the bells and whistles that an IT kid would love.
Keith handled the code server (code.crt.realtors.org) and the mail server (mail.crt.realtors.org). I handled the web server (www.crt.realtors.org) and our internal file server. Its always fun cleaning and rearranging the servers! All the servers got baselined with a nice fresh install of Centos5, and then we went from there. Maia is protecting our mail, WordPress is keeping us vocal, and Samba is storing our files.
The cost for Dunkin Donuts to help push us through this: $20
The cost for all the software to run the entire CRT IT shop: FREE
The cost of knowing this: Priceless
I promise to get back blogging better next week, as well as keeping up with the deep links!
P.S. - this was my test I didnt fudge up the blog! 
