Ken’s Sandbox

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).

The city of Bandon Committee for Community involvement had an agenda item about a community blog a month or so ago. It sounded interesting so I attended to contribute my $0.02 worth which amounted to a lot of encouragement. As a result of the meeting city manager Matt Winkel polled his newsletter readers as to whether they would like to get his newsletter in the form of a blog rather than via email. According to Matt, the response was less than overwhelming. I attribute this to peoples lack of understanding of exactly what a blog can do. (more…)