Development Blog

Krugman @ Google

Ben Wiseley (ActiveRain) — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 11:05:43 -0600

Any Michigan Realtors?

Ben Wiseley (ActiveRain) — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 10:11:00 -0600

What's the real deal with Detroit? Is it really this dangerous? For work at home types, this is almost tempting - or at least an interesting alternative to keeping $10K in the savings account. I've been to Detroit but not since the 80's.

http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2007/11/buy-houses-in-detroit-for-250-monthly.html?sid13

Mortgage industry set to eat your flesh. Again.

Ben Wiseley (ActiveRain) — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 13:14:36 -0600

On the Daily Kos today...

If a lender says you qualify for a loan at 5%, but your mortgage broker thinks you'll accept 5.25% and he turns out to be right, part of that extra .25% goes to him, and you're none the wiser.

Score +1 for "real estate is the most screwed up industry in America". Nice lobbying mortgage guys!

Yet more proof that all middle-men should be avoided.

Predatory Lending Association

Ben Wiseley (ActiveRain) — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 05:13:07 -0600

Nice satire... Predatory Lending Association

LOL Localism

Ben Wiseley (ActiveRain) — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 08:40:13 -0600

Social Network

Ben Wiseley (ActiveRain) — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 06:09:41 -0500

Jon turned me on to this great Ze Frank song so I mashed it up with some Google Images and Flickr shots...

Unrealistic sellers, death stars, design, feature creep

Ben Wiseley (ActiveRain) — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 19:05:46 -0500

Goodbye Caleb

Ben Wiseley (ActiveRain) — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 21:00:14 -0500

Everyone should leave a touching, personal goodbye to dear Caleb. Tag it "bye caleb".

Sorry - I couldn't resist

Express Yourself with Gizmoz Video Clips

Created with Gizmoz

Tips on Ad Targeting

Ben Wiseley (ActiveRain) — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 19:36:13 -0500

I'm sure Jon or Caleb or Matt will do a longer post about the ad system that went live this morning. But I thought I'd throw this out for you early (morning) adopters (we're on the west coast).

When you create an ad you need to target it to people and put in a bid above 1 cent per 1000 impressions (CPM) for it to show up. Our place holder ads have bids of 1 cent per 1000 impressions and will win the auction most of the time if you bid 1 cent as well.

Reviewing the first ads this morning people seem to get this. One thing that's not very clear though is the regional aspect of targeting ads.

If you're trying to target the general public (and not just logged in ActiveRain users) your ad will get MUCH more traffic if you just use a State (and not County/City). The reason for this is, if a user isn't logged in we generally know what state they're from by looking up the IP number in a table that maps IPs to States. We don't know what county or city they're in. This means your ad will only show up on the regional City/County/State pages for people not logged in. If you just specify state we can target people looking at most of the pages on our site based on IP look up.

In the future we'll try to get more specific location information from IP addresses but, this is the way it works now.

We'd love feedback on the system (in comments to this post if you want to tell me or using the feedback form). Let us know what you like/dislike/found confusing and we'll get fixes out in short order.

Thank you to all you early adopters!

-ben

(primary programmer on AR)

Where do users live?

Ben Wiseley (ActiveRain) — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 04:00:38 -0500

Haven't posted in a while and was playing around with Google Analytics and thought members might be interested in the traffic maps:

Market Meltdown

Ben Wiseley (ActiveRain) — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 08:30:16 -0500

Cramer looses it... I wonder how he really feels?

Looking for Realtor in Kirkland, WA

Ben Wiseley (ActiveRain) — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 09:36:48 -0500

59 photos on flickr

We've finally decided to cash out of our house in Kirkland, WA. Looking for someone great to work with on the sale. Ready to start the process immediately. Address is 330 7th Ave, Kirkland, WA 98033. Email me at activerain@gmail.com or just leave comments if you have any suggestions.

Thanks!

Selling your parents home

Ben Wiseley (ActiveRain) — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 11:18:10 -0500

We're going through the process of selling my mom's home and I thought it might be fun to put updates up here as things progress. We're using Carole Kuenzler - an old friend of my mom's for the sale. Sorry I didn't use an AR member - it wasn't my call but I've known Carole since childhood and she's a great person - so no worries there.

So far I'm finding out about all the "touch ups" I get to pay for (which I knew were coming) as well as septic inspection ($500). We're toying around with moving my mom early and doing some staging... if any of you have opinions on that I'd be interested. This is in Acton, Massachusetts for a house I think is going to go on the market for $450 (not sure of the exact price yet) in a rural neighborhood on a quiet street. Any of you think that $2k/mo in rent (moving my mom out early while still paying the mortgage) plus staging fees is worth doing? Think we'd see a return on that?

Time-lapse moving

Ben Wiseley (ActiveRain) — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 13:11:24 -0500

This is kind of real-estate related (well, maybe not, but what you guys do usually causes moving)... but it's fun...

I've been trying to figure out how we're going to do one of these videos for Kat (my wife) who is driving the entire length of I-90 in a few weeks from Seattle to Boston (we're going to be living on both costs for a while - so she can be closer to her parents).

Currently we're using Flix for the capture and VirtualDub for the post processing. The guy who wrote Flix is great, he's even hacking his code to make the cross country recording easier.

Anyway - we did this video this morning while loading Kat's Door-to-Door container ($1K from Seattle to Boston - not bad).

Needs work - needs audio/music... but we're still figuring this stuff out.

What Bubble? Buy a loft get a Land Rover

Ben Wiseley (ActiveRain) — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 10:57:17 -0500

On the Car obsessed Jalopnik: Buy a loft get a Land Rover

ActiveRain a year ago

Ben Wiseley (ActiveRain) — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 17:49:35 -0500

Is what about a year ago that Matt, James and I met to go over the initial design... here are the original "specs" :) (click any image to go to flickr to view larger sizes)

3D mapping

Ben Wiseley (ActiveRain) — Tue, 29 May 2007 14:31:46 -0500

If anyone is interested Microsoft and and EveryScape announced some really cool mapping tools today.

Article on this.

Microsoft looks like it just improved it's aerial photography option it's had for a while.

EveryScape though is doing some really cool stuff with photos... mashing them up into something you can navigate through (and into, as in "into a store") with lots of meta data (buttons for links to shops, etc.).

EveryScape

Microsoft

Updated... and, not to be left behind - Google has launched street map views.

Totally Inane

Ben Wiseley (ActiveRain) — Tue, 29 May 2007 10:39:05 -0500

Hate bugs on ActiveRain? Vent your frustration by punching the developer!

Link: PlayMyGame

Particls - personalized news and alerts

Ben Wiseley (ActiveRain) — Tue, 29 May 2007 10:23:07 -0500

Particls came out of private invite this morning and looks pretty cool (although it's Windows only). It allows highly configurable tracking and discovery of news. It displays these via ticker on your desktop and can alert you via email, cell phone, or pda. If you're dealing with information overload it might be worth giving a try. Check out their screen cast for examples.

Jerk management

Ben Wiseley (ActiveRain) — Fri, 25 May 2007 02:40:32 -0500

There's a great post by Cory Doctorov (of BoingBoing fame) on "How To Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community". Thankfully we've been really lucky at the lack of "Jerks"... but it's still a good read if anyone's interested.

He covers these solutions:

Smaller groups: Restrict the conversation
Delays: Slow down the discussion
Moderations: Allow people to moderate others
Observe the Troll Whisperer: Gifted moderators are few and far between... observe, learn and automate when possible... but it's pretty much a hiring problem

HTML oddities

Ben Wiseley (ActiveRain) — Thu, 24 May 2007 15:52:42 -0500

Just had a bug with iframe tags not behaving ... if any of you are doing similar things here is what does and doesn't work:

Technically, this should work (according to HTML rules):

But - that doesn't work and screws up the display for everyone else.

While <tag /> should work and is short hand for <tag></tag> in HTML it doesn't seem to play well with the iframe tag. So... to get this to work simply don't use the short hand... like this:

I'd like to stress, again, that, if you're using the HTML tab you need to preview your post in draft mode because, even doing things right isn't always good enough :)

flickrSLiDR - Embed Flickr Slide Shows

Ben Wiseley (ActiveRain) — Tue, 22 May 2007 00:35:16 -0500

flickrSLiDR allows you to embed slide shows of your flickr photos in any website. flickrSLiDR is currently on Digg - so it might be a bit slow (or even go down) to today... if so just book mark it and go back tomorrow. Here are some shots from my recent Moab trip.

Created with Paul's flickrSLiDR.

Meebo Rooms

Ben Wiseley (ActiveRain) — Tue, 15 May 2007 07:28:09 -0500

Meebo Rooms

Meebo Rooms allows you to create your own chat room that anyone can join - you can then embed this in your site.

Not very practical for a blog post but, perhaps we'll add this as an AR chat room.

You can find out more at Meebo Rooms or read about it on TechCrunch.

TLW ROAR! YouTubed

Ben Wiseley (ActiveRain) — Thu, 03 May 2007 10:14:05 -0500

Solo boy band

Ben Wiseley (ActiveRain) — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 20:14:40 -0500

And now for something completely different

Create Your Own PaloozaHead - Visit Lollapalooza.com