The Realtor® Trademark Fixer Wordpress Plugin
Posted by John Lockwood on June 17th, 2008
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.
June 17th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
Will it also convert it to the REQUIRED ALL CAPS? You know, it’s not “Realtor®”, or even “Realtor®”. It’s “REALTOR®”. All caps, all the time. Apparently NO ONE IN THE NAR REALIZES THAT’S THE SAME AS SHOUTING.
And I find that far more annoying than the “®” symbol.
It’s really pretty cool John. Wonder if I could tweak the code so that if you type “Jay” it’ll change it to “Stud”?
Can I link to it from NARWisdom.com?
June 17th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Can you link to it and promote it? Heck yeah! One thing, though. If you install it first, it will break the URL for this post (because it will put the trademark in!). I may need some way to type the word literally because it may wreak havoc when you try to link to http://www.realt….com (for example) or other urls. Meantime you can link to this:
http://www.particlewave.com/internet-marketing/rtplugin.php (which in turn will redirect to this post).
I agree with you — all caps is not common Internet usage. It doesn’t do that. It will however capitalize the first letter if you don’t.
Jay, when you write “Jay”, stud is understood!
June 17th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
OK — version 1.1 released:
Adds ability to suppress trademark (for example, when linking to Realtor.com), by adding “[sic]” (brackets, but no quotes) after realtor, Realtors, etc. Link above points to the new version.
I used it to post this comment.
If you edit the post and update it, you have to have the [sic] in there to continue to suppress it, otherwise you’ll get Realtor®.
June 17th, 2008 at 7:07 pm
Version 1.2 — disables transformations in comments. Let’s test it out: Hey guys, you should check out http://www.realtor.com. I am a Realtor. No actually I’m a Realtor® There. That’s better.
That’s probably a better way to go for now until I can write the ultimate Realtor®-fixer Regular Expression.
So to sum up:
If you want the trademark, just type realtor.
If you don’t want the trademark, type realtor with “[sic]” afterwards. This way you can link to realtor.com by typing realtor[sic].com or what have you.
Your comments won’t be changed, so your visitors don’t need to know these rules.
June 17th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
Well damn! I have spent all this time knowing how to use it correctly including in my name for comments and now there is a way to do it automatically. Unfortunately, from what I have seen most REALTORS® don’t care to use it correctly going so far as as to use it incorrectly with an adjective.
June 18th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
[...] can read about John’s Realtor® Plug-in at Particle Wave. Here’s the catch. The plugin will break the url to any post or site with [...]
June 18th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
[...] Here’s the plugin, if you want to get it. This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 5:37 pm and is filed under Tech Notes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. [...]
June 18th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
[...] More details can be found here. (link corrected) [...]
July 10th, 2008 at 9:03 am
You cannot use plugins with wordpress.com - go ahead and try it… it’s not allowed.
July 10th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
So I wouldn’t use it there.