Web Site Design and Development

Are you respecting the Realtor® trademark?

Maybe you’re mad at NAR and you don’t care if you add the trademark symbol or not, but for most of us, we don’t mind (and consider it a lower risk proposition) to go ahead and put the trademark on there. Realtor®, as you may know, is a registered trademark of the National Association of Realtors®.

The trouble for bloggers is that many bloggers don’t know how to type the trademark symbol, and even for those that do, typing that stupid “®” every time is a pain in the neck. But don’t worry, the plugin makes it simple. Install it, then go ahead and type the r-word (in either lower case or upper case), and the plugin will automatically correct your usage.

Installation: Just download the plugin, unzip it into your Wordpress plugin directory, activate it on the Manage Plugins page, and you’re good to go! No warranty is provided, including fitness for use. Enjoy!

Current Release

The 1.4 Release (final?) leaves hyphenated forms (realtor-whatever or whatever-realtor) alone. This is important as we found out because Wordpress permalinks frequently use hyphens, and people couldn’t link to this post. Now a link to this post will work!

Version 1.3 added the Realtor® Fix Plugin Test Page, which you can visit to see how the plugin will transform your posts. Because it’s pretty well tested, the plugin offers a simple switch (see the plugin code) for enabling comment filtering if you want. However, it still ships with comment filtering disabled by default. This version offers improved matching code, so most URLs with some version of “Realtor®” in them should work well without using the “[sic]” to disable adding the trademark. However, adding the “[sic]” is still supported. Finally, this version also offers support for capitalizing the REALTOR® trademark. Simply type it in all caps (REALTOR®) and it will do the right thing. If you capitalize the first letter or don’t capitalize anything, you’ll get “Realtor®”.

The 1.2 Release added two features: First, if you add “[sic]” after the r-word it will suppress adding the trademark (but remove the “[sic]“). Thus, if you need to link to realtor.com, use http://www.realtor.com. Secondly, comments are not processed. A few minutes after I had the plugin installed a user used the r-word in a url, and it was transformed. Users commenting shouldn’t have to know the rules of use.

We have announced the winners of Houssee #2 over at our Placeville Real Estate Blog.

Congratulations to all the winners and special thanks to all who participated with your votes and submissions, whether you nabbed a valuable shirt this week or not.

Remember the Houssee award is based on your votes for your favorite posts, so to make the system work, if you see something you like, vote it up!

Think of it as “Broker Co-Op”.

Instead of wondering who won the Houssee award this week, I’ve spent the last few days playing spam cop.  In the hope of not having to do this too often, here’s an unfortunate reminder from our law enforcement division.

On the issue of vote manipulation, as our spam policy states: 

…if your friend is just you by another name, or if you and your friend have secretly agreed to promote everything for each other regardless of the quality, that crosses the line and becomes spam. Your published posts may sent back to the upcoming queue, or if you persist, your posts or account may be deleted.

A few users spent quite a bit of time testing out this policy this week, and have discovered that it works.  For those of you who didn’t test it out, thank you, and yes I do hate being a cop probably as much as you hate reading about me being one.

Most of you have probably noticed the Top Users widget that appears on every page of Houssee.com. If you have a competitive streak (I know I do), the first thing you want to know is: “How can I bump those undeserving people who aren’t me off the top spot and get my very deserving self up there in the limelight?”

If you poke around in the Top Users page, you may have noticed that the Top Users on the widget are the users who have the highest Karma score. OK, so far so good, now you know what number you’re shooting for, but what is Karma?

Time Flies Like An Arrow. (Fruit Flies Like a Banana)

Fortunately, this is not Karma in the Buddhist sense that you have to make up for the rotten stuff you may have done in a past life. In fact, what you did in this life won’t help you much, either — unless you did it recently. You see, unlike many point systems (ActiveRain’s, for example), Houssee doesn’t much care what you did last month. We take the history from a shorter period of time — currently 10 days — and look at that.

In the future we may change that number, or tweak the way the system works to be more of a weighted combination of “lifetime achievement” plus “what have you done for Houssee lately”? But at present, the Top Users widget only goes 10 days back. Naturally, you still get a benefit from your links being in the system and from the Houssee Awards you may have won, but as far the Top Users widget is concerned, 11 days ago is the Middle Ages.

How To Be a Top User

To be a top user, basically you have to do more of the following over a ten day period than all but five of your fellow users:

1. Submit Links
   The most heavily rewarded activity is submitting new content for other people to read. Naturally most of us are pretty interested in using the system to highlight our own content, but remember the system doesn’t care if you submit a link to your own blog posts or to some news article or blog post you found interesting. Please keep in mind our spam policy, however — real estate (broadly considered) only!
2. Comment on Other People’s Submissions
   One of the changes I made to the default (Pligg) Karma system was to add in a factor for commenting on other people’s submissions. This is in keeping with the basic spam-o-phobic philosophy of Houssee, that even though we’re busy promoting our content and singing the Realtor® musical scale (mi mi mi), we’re also part of a community of other people. Reading their stuff and commenting on it is a good thing. (Well, I guess you can debate whether its good or not, but I can guarantee you that it’s part of the Karma algorithm). You currently get a few less points for doing this than for submitting a link , but much more than you do for the next item.
3. Vote for Submissions
   Least heavily rewarded by the Karma algorithm — but nevertheless very quick and easy to do — is voting for other people. Is that a cheap way to make the number of votes higher? Well, yes, I guess it has that effect. Does it foster a sort of Special Olympics everyone-gets-a-prize mentality? Yes, I suppose uncharitably one could say that, too. More to the point, it’s in keeping again with the goal of fostering a real community, one where you get rewarded not only for your individual contributions, but also for recognizing the contributions of others. Granted that recognition is pretty mechanical in this case, which is why #1 and #2 count so much more heavily.

Yes, I know most such systems reward “Published” content, and we may get there as more and more users come on board, but for now what you see above is pretty much it.

In case your curious, no, the Algorithm doesn’t have a cheat in it that guarantees John Lockwood will be on top. The fact that I own the domain means I can always throw a link somewhere if I want one, but as far as the Top Users widget code is concerned, I’m competing along with everyone else.

Now you have the tools — come knock me off that top spot if you can!

And stay tuned for “Houssee Awards, Part Deux: The Re-Houssee-ing.” Coming soon.

As you consider your web site design, it helps to bear in mind groove to the basic architecture that we’re dealing with here.

Well, we’re all having a great time on Houssee. We’re having so much fun that it’s time for an update:

• Lots of folks have been stopping by to visit. Even though we’re only eleven days old we have — coincidentally enough — 101 stories submitted or published, and 101 users. Hey, this makes finding the average easy!
• We’ve announced our first group of Award Winners, we have a valuable prize for them to win.
• We have a written Spam Policy. Don’t Do It.
• We now have our very own blog (OK, so I admit it, technically it’s a Wordpress tag on ParticleWave’s very own blog — but that’s fun, too). Hey look, you’re reading it!
• We have our own FeedBurner Feed so you can keep track of the latest Houssee submissions. So far we’re feeding the submissions rather than the publications, but that may change soon when I announce the new algorithm for the top user sidebar. Stay tuned.
• We fixed an obscure technical problem, and got grouchy with a guy who was stubborn about it. It’s probably not interesting to you, but if you like obscure technical problems or seeing me grouchy, read about it.
• We have a MyBlogLog account for Houssee. Don’t look now, but your head is showing.

Houssee.com: Submit Early. Vote Often.