I just read about HouseAmerica.com (via the Future of Real Estate Marketing Blog) trying to clone Zillow.

I tried to use the site to see how their estimates compared. Unfortunately, they could not find the address of the house I just sold.

I guess I can see why. I was a new construction after all...

... in 1969.

I read qute a number of Active Rain posts, and have seen a lot of charts. Most often the charts I have seen look like they are created in Excel, screen captured, saved as a JPG, and posted as an image.

I recently started using the Google Charts api for some of my online chart needs. I'll admit. that the way they have you generate chats is not for the feint of heart, though. They expect you to do some really odd conversions to represent the values in your charts. At first I thought, shucks, that's too bad. The charts are quite nice, but the way to create the chart is pretty gross.

Here are some sample charts:

I have since discovered a website that help generate the code for your charts. Holhi Charts is an online tool that allows you to fill in a few simple forms to create your charts.

Its important to note that the charts can only dispaly values up to 4095 -- sort of a weird number. So if you are going to be plotting home prices, you'll need to round them to the thousands.

I hope it helps.

I've been watching the number of tokens registered as part of our secure login rollout. And so far, things have gone very well. You all have been doing a great job in getting your tokens registered. Hopefully the video I created helped some of you get your token enrolled with a minimum of effort.

This chart shows the general trend in enrolled tokens by day.

Yesterday, January 2, was our busiest day for enrollments with over 2700 tokens enrolled in one day. And yet, only 141 calls came in to our help desk regarding any aspect of the Secure login project.

This tells me that you guys get it, and the enrollment process is not too hard. (Breathes sigh of relief) So far, over 16,000 tokens have been sucessfully enrolled by our customers.

The tokens have flown all over the world. For example, there are now tokens in Fiji, Thailiand and France, among other places.

I have been taking calls along with our help desk (in fact, every single person at MRIS right up to the CEO has been taking turns on the help desk) and some of the common themes have been:

1. Where is my token? Your token is on the way. I walkway confirm the address we sentit to, but the last 8,000 tokens or so, just went out in the mail. If you don;t get your token by January 10th, give us a call.
2. How do I register the token? A certain number of people just want a comforting voice walking them through something new. We're happy to help.
3. Do I have to use this every time? Yes. Your token will provide a new password for every time you log in. Each time you log in you'll need to press taht button and get a new password.
4. Is that an "S" or a "5"? There are three characters that will NEVER appear on a token: "B", "O" (oh) and "S" -- Those will always be "8", "0" (zero) and "5" respectively.

Hi MRIS folks. I just posted over a the MRIS blog a note about the SAFEMLS packets being mailed out next week. Please be on the lookout for you packet. In it will be your new token that you'll use to login. Also included in the packet will be instructions for how to activate your token -- it only takes two minutes. 

UPDATE: The maintenance has been completed.  

There will be an outage tonight as we roll out several enhancements to Matrix. matrix will be offline on the evening of December 10 at around 10:00 pm, and should be back on-line by 1:00 am. This outage is scheduled so we can roll out a host of enhancements to Matrix that many of you have asked for. Here is a summary of those enhancements. In the coming days I'll be preparing posts on how to get the most out of these new features.

At the bottom, you'll see new features designed specifically for teams. If you are part of a team, take some time to get to know the new team features.  I think they are pretty cool, and I hope you do to.

Here is list of some of the new features coming tonight in Matrix. 

Over on my main blog, I just finished up a series of video tutorials on managing, editing and resizing your photos in preparation for uploading them to the MLS (in this case, MRIS, the MLS I work for.)

There are several lessons linked together into one sequential playlist that describe a simple workflow that gets the images off your camera, edited, resized, and ready for upload to the MLS. In the tutorials, I use Picasa, the photo editing software from Picasa that make working with photos super easy.

Nothing in the videos is specific to MRIS per se, so I thought other Active Rainers might benefit from this workflow, which should work for many other MLS.

Hi Active Rainers, my name is Mike DelGaudio, and I am with MRIS, the MLS in Maryland, DC, Virginia, with parts of West Virginia and Pennsylvania. I also am one of the authors of the MRIS blog -- over at http://www.mrisblog.com. So.... if you are a subscriber to MRIS, I'd love to see you over there. 

From time to time I'll cross post to this blog items from that blog over here that may be of interest to the larger real estate population.