ByTheProgrammer » Work in progress

Open Houses, its time for a change

Frédérick Dubois — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 05:25:44 +0000

The Open Houses feature will be redesigned in the following weeks.

Organizing an open house day is a great way to attract visitors and potential buyers. If you got any suggestions concerning this tool, now is the moment!

RSS Feeds, how and why?

Frédérick Dubois — Tue, 01 May 2007 17:16:39 +0000

ByTheOwner.com will be integrating in the next days the use of RSS feeds for the diffusion of the ByTheOwner Alerts. The visitors searching for a property will be able, with a single click, to create a RSS feed corresponding to their search criteria, and thus to be the first to know when the house of their dream gets live on the website.

RSS feeds are soooo cool ! But… why?

A RSS feed (Really Simple Syndication), is a XML file which a Web site diffuses in order to spread easily its contents. From the feed’s url, one can daily consult the new contents of the site without being forced to go on the website. Okay… so what? Why wouldn’t you want to go to the website?

Subscribing to RSS feeds becomes interesting from the moment you register several different rss feeds. With this intention, you will have to use a RSS reader in which you will add rss feeds that you wish to follow. You could thus add to your reader various blogists whom you would like to consult daily, 2 or 3 news sites, AND of course, your ByTheOwner Alerts RSS feeds.

In only one glance, you will be able to see all that is new in your favorite websites. And if one of your RSS feed loses its interest, hop, you simply erase it of the reader. Easier than unsubscribing to most of the emailing lists out there!

Many search engines (like Yahoo! and Google for example) also offer aggregation functions for your RSS feeds directly on their home page. I also strongly suggest that you give a try to NetVibes and Google Reader, two online tools that perfectly do the job and which, of course, are free!

Frédérick Dubois, Programmer
ByTheOwner.com / DuProprio.com

Use of GMarkerManager disappointing on Internet Explorer IE6

Frédérick Dubois — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 17:21:31 +0000

Google added recently the GMarkerManager class to the Google Maps API. This class is used to manage visibility of hundreds of markers on a map, based on the map’s current viewport and zoom level.

We are actually working on a new version of the Map search for ByTheOwner and I was very optimistic about this new api class. It is very cool and easy to use, but I unfortunately reached it’s limits pretty fast. I was able to display my provinces and regions markers “A1″. The cities then came up with a little more difficulty. But the 4000 homes for sale markers were too much. Under Mozilla Firefox it wasn’t that bad but IE really didn’t like it.

At this point, I am using the MarkerManager class combined with a php clustering. Once you zoom enough to be in the properties or cities level, I add markers only with coordinates around the viewport. An ajax call reloads the markers when the user pans or zooms enough.

Google Maps API documentation for GMarkerManager »

What’s the difference between GMarkerManager and MarkerManager ?

GMarkerManager is native in the Google Maps API. MarkerManager, on the other hand, needs a javascript inclusion.

Google opened up the GMarkerManager code for external developpers to implement new function in the maps api. New functions like clearAllMarkers are available in the open source version.
http://googlemapsapi.blogspot.com/2007/03/new-open-source-utility-library-for.html

Frédérick Dubois, ByTheOwner.com
Web development and programming

Google Adwords for our listings

Frédérick Dubois — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 18:03:10 +0000

I’m working on a prototype that automatically creates Adwords campaigns for our new clients. The goal is, that whenever a client get’s online, a pay-per-click keyword campaign is activated on Google, based on the city and type of the property for sale.

By creating a great amount of campaign and choosing low CPC I’m optimistic on getting a great ROI. This should bring new visitors to ByTheOwner, especially in the cities where the Real Estate market isn’t too “hot”.

Google Base beta limits currency to USD

Frédérick Dubois — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 01:18:13 +0000

Damn, I just received an email from the Google team telling me that there is a problem with my xml file. Seems like the Bulk Upload program doesn’t accept the canadian currency for our houses prices. Also, we are forced to display a USD price onto our own pages.

I think that I’ll display the USD price with the CAD, but only when a visitor is coming from Google Base. This should be easy to detect using the $_SERVER[”HTTP_REFERER”] variable.

Post it on Base. Find it on Google.

Frédérick Dubois — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 03:16:58 +0000

I began this week to test the Google Base beta projet API and bulk upload program.
Google Base is an online database provided by Google into which any user can add almost any type of content. A major component of Google Base is acting like a classified ads service. Some US real estate brokers are already listing their properties in this database and they seem pretty satisfied with the results and visits they get. We figured out that posting the homes for sale from ByTheOwner to Google Base could be a great idea to get additionnal visibility on our clients’ listings.

There a 3 ways to list a home for sale on Google Base.

Fill a online form describing the home for sale : Works great, but I definitely wouldn’t want to be the one filling all the forms for the properties on ByTheOwner, eheh
Work with the Google Base API, wich is quite simple if you get started with the demo.
Bulk upload. You first create a spreadsheet or xml file containing a list of items you want to send to google. Then you upload the file in your Base account and google processes the items in the file.

At first, I started with the API cause I wanted to send the ads to google instantly when the homes were created on ByTheOwner. But the need to get authentified with google everytime made my program very unpleasant to use. I figured out that the best option for me was the bulk upload. So I’m working on a script that will create a xml file containing all the active listings on ByTheOwner every morning. I’ll just have to upload the file to Google Base and Ta-Da!

I sent a first 20 homes batch on friday for testing purpose and it seems to work pretty well. Only problem I see is that the description is incomplete in the search results. I’ll start uploading all of our clients ads as soon as I’ll get this fixed.