February 22nd, 2010
For any internet-centric business, the website’s domain name can make or break your company. Think about it — when giving somebody your domain name (or your “URL”), they are going to immediately make judgements about it. Before seeing a single pixel of design. Before seeing a single word of content.
There are plenty of guides on how to register a domain name — they will help you avoid some common mistakes when registering your domain. But let’s assume you nailed it. You have an absolutely perfect domain for your business, and it’s been organically driving lots of good traffic to your site. Unless you have control of your Domain Name Servers DNS, you could potentially lose that domain, either by accident or by malicious activity.
The place where you originally purchased your domain is called the “registrar” — if you are the controller of a business and don’t personally have a username/password to your registrar, you are at risk! Either your domain might expire (on average a registration lasts 1 to 2 years), or someone might be able to log in and delete/redirect traffic from that domain.
I once knew a mother/son real estate team — their last names were the same so they both used the same domain name, let’s call it “smithRE.com”. This domain saw incredible traffic due to its generic nature, but eventually the two parted ways to start their own offices. The son actually logged into the registrar, changed all the passwords, and held the domain for ransom from his own mother!
Don’t let this happen to you! Make sure you have all the passwords — and all the control — of your domains!
Posted by torgie in Uncategorized | No Comments »
February 18th, 2010
While working my way through some not-so-complicated tables earlier today, I ran into a Chrome bug (I believe) with table cell heights when using a rowspan.
This table will render incorrectly in Chrome:
The first two cells on the left will collapse to be as small as they can - just large enough for the text they contain. The third cell will then become very tall to cover the remaining space. In Firefox and Internet Explorer, all cells are equally spaces, as is the expected outcome. I’ve written up a more detailed bug report on the 3-1 Design site.
Posted by torgie in Uncategorized | No Comments »
December 13th, 2009
This came up while working on some code. I want to keep an internal counter within a function, and every time the function is called, return the incremented result. The function ended with return $i++; which, after I typed it, realized may not work as expected.
I wrote this quick test code to figure out what might happen.
<?php
function increment()
{
static $count = 0;
// do stuff
return $count++;
}
for($i=0; $i<4; $i++)
{
echo 'i=' . $i . ' return=' . increment() . "n";
}
?>I figured one of three things might happen:
Option 1: $count is never incremented because return returns the pre-incremented value and prevents it from incrementing.
i=0 return=0
i=1 return=0
i=2 return=0
i=3 return=0
Option 2: $count is incremented and the incremented value is passed to return.
i=0 return=1
i=1 return=2
i=2 return=3
i=3 return=4
Option 3: The current value of $count is evaluated and passed to the return, $count is incremented, then the function returns.
i=0 return=0
i=1 return=1
i=2 return=2
i=3 return=3
Well it turns out that the function does what I wanted it to do, option 3. Can you explain why the value of $count can be incremented after the function returns?
Tags: php
Posted by aaronpk in Coding | 2 Comments »
November 12th, 2009
While signing up for a new Google Analytics profile, we noticed a change in their new platform. The confirmation screen that gives you the tracking code is now drawn in via AJAX. Being the curious types that we are, we opened up Firebug to take a look at why this might be happening.
The first thing we noticed was that the response from Google looks like a block of PHP code wrapped in what appears to be a Java serialized string.
Cleaning up the response, it looks like this:
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| <?php
// Copyright 2009 Google Inc. All Rights Reserved.
$GA_ACCOUNT = "MO-11576892-1";
$GA_PIXEL = "ga.php";
function googleAnalyticsGetImageUrl() {
global $GA_ACCOUNT, $GA_PIXEL;
$url = "";
$url .= $GA_PIXEL . "?";
$url .= "utmac=" . $GA_ACCOUNT;
$url .= "&utmn=" . rand(0, 0x7fffffff);
$referer = $_SERVER["HTTP_REFERER"];
$query = $_SERVER["QUERY_STRING"];
$path = $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
if (empty($referer)) {
$referer = "-";
}
$url .= "&utmr=" . urlencode($referer);
if (!empty($path)) {
$url .= "&utmp=" . urlencode($path);
}
$url .= "&guid=ON";
return $url;
}
?>
<?php
$googleAnalyticsImageUrl = googleAnalyticsGetImageUrl();
?>
<img src="<?= $googleAnalyticsImageUrl ?>" /> |
It’s definitely PHP, so why does the server return PHP code to a client-side script? It returned a function that builds up an image URL containing our account ID and some other information.
The Tracking Code Troubleshooting page has documentation on what all the query string parameters mean. The image URL that is built up contains only basic information of what would otherwise look like a normal tracking code request. Only the account ID, path, referrer, and a random number are passed. There’s also guid=ON, which is not in the documentation.
The other strange part is that normally the account ID begins with UA-, but in this case begins with MO-. Maybe it’s some sort of initialization request?
Tags: code, Google
Posted by aaronpk in Coding | No Comments »
November 6th, 2009
Our Walkscore widget just got a bit smarter! As mentioned on the company blog, Walkscore just incorporated public transit information to their data! Because we tie in directly to their API, our widget automatically got the new feature.
All of our single property sites come with the Walkscore widget included on the Community page. This means that you can instantly provide public transit data to your clients - with no extra work!
I’d say it’s the easiest upgrade we’ve ever implemented :) Thanks, Walkscore! We can’t wait to see what you guys come up with next!
Posted by torgie in Uncategorized | No Comments »
October 12th, 2009
Well, we certainly have been busy these last few months! Real Design Online has relocated our offices to the bright, sunny Portland, Oregon! Well, maybe it’s bright and sunny a few days of the year.
This is an exciting change of scenery for us, and our new offices are just swell! Bringing everyone closer together means we can get features added faster, get shinier templates, and better support all-around.
If you are in the real estate business and want to grab lunch sometime, give us a ring 
Posted by torgie in Uncategorized | No Comments »
July 4th, 2009
With six bold color themes to choose from, and the ability to upload a custom header graphic, this template is our most versatile yet!
Start with Orange, Strawberry, Lime, Forest, Blueberry or Eggplant, then customize the header with your logo or a photo of the property. With six colors to choose from, you’re sure to find one to complement your custom header.
Tags: Design, Templates
Posted by aaronpk in Release Notes, Templates | No Comments »
June 24th, 2009
Today we launched a new feature (requested by one of our clients) which allows you to upload custom graphics into the header of certain templates!
The “Flow” template by default looks like this:
With the custom header, the template can match the property:
The ability to upload graphics like this opens up endless possibilities for you to customize our templates to exactly your liking.
We hope you enjoy this new feature, and encourage you to suggest new ideas you might have!
Posted by aaronpk in Release Notes | 1 Comment »
June 19th, 2009
We are proud to announce a new feature - visitor statistics for your property sites! This page provides, at a quick glance, lots of useful information about how many times your sites are being viewed. If you really want to impress your seller, print this page and show them just how much exposure their property is getting!
The top of the page has an overall traffic graph showing number of page views per day, overlayed with number of craigslist views. You can also see a breakdown of the most popular days of the week and hours of the day.
At the bottom is a list of referring websites people were on when they clicked a link to your site, and shows you which ones are bringing in the most hits. Your craigslist postings will appear here, as well as any other websites that link to your posting. Additionally, search terms people enter into search engines will be highlighted in bold so you can see what key words people are using to find your site.
We hope you enjoy this new feature as much as we enjoyed creating it!
Posted by aaronpk in Release Notes | No Comments »
June 19th, 2009
That pricing page… I don’t think any other page in our application, front-end or back-end, has received the same level of attention. It’s extremely important that we communicate our pricing perfectly to our potential (and existing!) customers.
Previously, we charged a tiny fee up-front for publishing sites, and then on top of it a monthly fee which represented our hosting, and other bundled services.
Now, we’ve done away with this multi-level billing system, and simply combined both of those charges into a single (and slightly cheaper!) monthly payment. The new pricing page should explain how everything works… and there’s even a built-in freebie site now!
We also have a lovely new template making an appearance in the gallery page - everyone say hello to Noteworthy, please!
Noteworthy only has one variant right now, called “parchment”… but this is a calm, classic template for anybody selling a home with a musical history. More variants are in the works.
Oh, and speaking of things which are in the works, we’ll have a huge new feature coming through concerning templates - It was recommended to us by a client of ours, and we listened! You can get the full details here soon when the patch is made.
That about wraps it up for this Friday. If you have any comments or questions about the new pricing, just leave a note here and we’ll make sure to help you out as best we can!
Posted by torgie in Business, Templates | No Comments »
