Ken’s Sandbox

When I got my new notebook, I went out of my way to avoid Vista. I’m not quite able to go to Linux yet so XP was number one on my list of “features”. Since making that decision I have read reports that Microsoft Vista runs 15% slower than XP (a billion lines of code, what do you expect), Vista is no more secure than XP (ditto), and I just ran across this article about the information Vista sends back to Microsoft. It seems that M$ is collecting more information about Vista users than even I suspected. And I suspected a lot.

So I’m going through my drafts turning them into posts, and I get to this link: http://www.realfuturecrm.com/public/. I vaguely remembered it, but to be honest, it has been in my drafts so long I don’t remember how I found it.

RealFutureCRM is a real estate specific customer relationship management system. Not being an agent, I did not sign up (they have a free trial). From the information on their web site it looks good. If/when I have time, I’ll contact them, sign up and write a short review.
In the mean time, if you decide to give it a try (or are already using it), let me know what you think.

A while ago an agent, who shall remain nameless, mentioned that some of the spelling in RealWorld ad copy made our agents look like a bunch of back country hicks. That may be a bit excessive but spelling and grammar when correct go pretty much unnoticed. When was the last time you read something and thought “wow, no spelling errors and what nice grammar”. However, if spelling and grammar are bad, you notice. And when you notice, you automatically wonder about the person who wrote it.

A spell checker won’t catch all of your errors. It won’t catch typos like an accidental d on the end of an. It won’t catch there for their and other grammatical errors. But if you are a bad speller like me, you need to check your spelling.

I was told RMLS uses a plug in that allows you to click a button and check the spelling. This would be nice but it is one of the things that makes their system compatible with IE only.

I was delighted when I installed Firefox 2 and discovered that it had spell checking built in (automatic for text areas and you can right click on a text input field and spell check it).

If you don’t want to use Firefox, iespell is an Internet Explorer spell checking plug in that will spell check your web input before you submit it. You can download it at http://www.iespell.com. It is free for personal use, $15 if your conscience bothers you.

So their you have it. You know longer halve any reasons to look bad in print. (hay - it passed the spell checker).

I went to a client website yesterday to grab a logo and the site was down. Their site is hosted with Advanced Access. Tried another client site that I knew was with Advanced access and it was down as well.

Running my own servers I understand that an occasional outage is inevitable. However, I checked again this morning and both sites are still down. Checked a third clients site and it is also down. That’s gotta hurt. It looks like a good time to be a web developer if the competition cannot keep their web servers running.

I have just added a function to the Utilities menu that allows you to view your listings (and the hot sheets for MLS members) on your desktop without having to log on to RealWorld. I have been using these to monitor new listings as you enter them into RealWorld and am quite excited about what can be done.

The functions use a desktop Dashboard program called KlipFolio. KlipFolio is a very small download (about 900kb) and with all of the RealWorld functions installed (as well as weather and Google news), uses about 5 mb of ram. KlipFolio only runs under XP and Windows 2000. And, because it automatically downloads data from the server every few minutes, I do not recommend it unless you have a broadband (always on) internet connection.

So far the response to these has been very positive. I am in the process of adding more capabilities around KlipFolio so install it today.