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Trulia's HousingWidgets.com and better widget support on ActiveRain

Early last week Trulia launched a new project over at HouseWidgets.com to "a portal for all real estate professionals to share, find, upload and review real estate Internet tools." For those of you that don't know what a widget is, they are basically little applications you can add to your blog or website. For instance they may include chat controls such as MeeboMe, Mortgage Calculators, charts of neighborhood statistics, or VFlyer.

I've notices a lot of ActiveRain members adding widgets to the right hand navigation on their blogs and in their posts themselves. Unfortunatly the post editor we use has a nasty habit in Internet Explorer of mangling the code for some of these widgets. So we've added an HTML tab that will allow people to add the code for widgets to their posts without mangling them. Switching between tabs can be still has some issues in certain browsers so we recommend that you save your post to a draft before switching to HTML and adding your widget.

You can also add widgets to your side navigation very easily under your profile settings.

Posted by Matt Heaton on 05/19/2007 11:46 PM

Comments (42)

widgets, trulia

42 Comments on Trulia's HousingWidgets.com and better widget support on ActiveRain

MAY

2007

Thanks!

I appreciate the change, but it's a little awkward. It's better that you can go back and forth between tabs. It can kind of be a little frustrating the way you have it. Thanks for all the work you do providing us with this forum of ActiveRain.

matt, great info, I would post a blog about this, but you did it, so I will save my time on that :P thanks for sharing it !

Yeah, it's kinda awkward and we're continuing to investigate some other editors that may solve the problem.

Thanks for all heads up. I am a new member to Active Rain and the blog world. Active Rain has been so instrumental with my business today I don't know how I worked before with out it. It's like the microwave once you use one you wonder how people survived with out one. It's been a great tool and wealth of information, mostly it's a heck of a lot of fun. Maybe too much fun because my wife used to think I was on my lap top a ton, and now she thinks I'm a junkie! "It's my home work honey"

Thanks for the updates, Matt. I wondered about the add-on. Hope the issues between HTML and WYSIWYG get resolved. easily for you.

Jeff

MAY

2007

Hi Jeff,

I love shia's analogy of the microwave and ActiveRain. Very Good. Thanks for the links. I found them very useful.

William

I swear ... I wake up every day and you guys have something new ... I love it!! Thank you.

Thanks Matt, and thank you for keeping this community informed and up to date.

Matt - This doesn't have to do with widgets but you're the only post I've seen mentioning the new tabs - except my own in which I've been asking how to add a background to my blogs with the new tabs. I can't seem to find an answer. Do you know? I would be forever grateful if you can help me!

Matt- You just helped me to understand something that I have been wanting to learn more about. Now I know widgets are not necessarily to be feared. Seems I still have to be careful though. Thanks!

Matt- By the way, how did you come up with the name Active Rain? I must have missed th apost that told.

Hey Matt - I posted a pretty extensive post in WYSIWYG and it didn't turn out right - it cut out a lot of my content.

Luckily I copied the entire article into my clipboard before I pasted as a precaution. I had to take it into dreamweaver and create it how I wanted it and then dump it into the HTML section. I think the WYSIWYG section needs a little work.

Matt- thank you for all the hard work you do for us here on the Rain. For us just learning about the higher tech end, it is a wonderful learning tool. Thank You!

Matt,

THANKS! Appreciate the tech updates. You do a great job here.

Thanks a lot Matt - now I'm going to be late to church because I've been sitting here playing around with these widget thingys! (I knew I shouldn't "take a quick peek" at AR - it's like potato chips.)

Matt, I used the html button the first time this morning. It was much easier. I saved what I wrote first in Word so I didn't loose it. Thanks I love Vflyer.com

This is wonderful - thanks for pointing out the website and sharing what AR is doing to facilitate our use of widgets.

Very nice...I am with everyone else. Keeping up with the changing trends and updates to our avaiable technology to use in real estate is a full time job.

YEAH! Thanks for the update!

Thanks for the tip Matt, and all your ongoing support on AR.

So where do you ad the widget to your profile.

Jeff, go into settings. Then add the html where it says BLOG DESCRIPTION

Update

Then go check you blog page and it will be there. If not email me off line, I've had to show a few AR people how.

Widgets - what a funny word that is! Thanks for sharing this info - I've been noticing more and more here on AR, and wondered what the deal was with those and how to add something if I wanted to. I just didn't want to expose my lack of knowledge on that. :-)

Now I know where to go and I might tread out into the deeper end of the pool now - maybe.

Thanks again,
Ann

Matt...

Now that you have brought this up...I have been having problems with some of the widgets that I encounter on other members Blogs. IE7 seems to be doing a "duh" with some of them. Especially that popular weather widget.

What's happening is that the comment boxes will not finish loading if there is a widget that IE7 does not like. When I switch over to Firefox I have no problem.

Does this issue relate to any of the changes that you guys have been making? Or do you agree with others that this is happening because IE7 s*cks?

TLW...ROAR!

Hi Matt,

Thanks for sharing this info with us. I was recently at the NAR Mid-Year meetings in D.C. and attended the forum on Business Technology & Information Systems, and I was amazed at how many of my fellow Realtors didn't even know who Trulia was! There are so many exciting and helpful tools coming out every day for Realtors - I feel a bit like a kid in a candy store. There is a brave new world out there, and I for one can't wait!

Thanks for adding the change and keeping us updated, keep up the good work. Thank you

Thanks for sharing this awesome tool with us, and for showing how to implement it correctly!

Thanks!

MAY

2007

Thanks for constantly upgrading the quality of service. AR constantly underporminses and overdelivers!

Great to see Trulia putting together a widget directory, and nice of ActiveRain to make these easy to implement. Thanks for the improvements!

MAY

2007

Thanks Matt...you know I love this stuff!! Great Post!

Suggestion: create a save feature so we can switch back and forth between the two entry screens without posting the blog entry.

Otherwise, it's great.

JUN

2007

Thank you Matt. You and your team are always keeping up with the demands of the expanding membership, and keeping up with the latest in Technology. Your ability to rapidly and effectively integrate new features and new technologies will keep ActiveRain on the leading edge. In the world of tools for real estate professionals, Active Rain leads the pack!

OCT

2007

Thanks for your help here. I learn something new every day. You do a great job with this.

MAR

2008

Hi Matt thanks for the information. Where do I copy the html code?

APR

2008

thanks, great post

MAY

2008

Trulia's New Logo Taunts Realtors Who Use Widgets

MAY

2008

I"m still lost - And the best of it is that I used to be in technology - not soooooo many years ago - I'm off to play with this and I do appreciate your input - I've been struggling with format and seeing beautiful web pages for some realtors and wondering how they're doing it. Do I need a toolset like Dreambuilder or can I do most of this in Word and just past to HTML?
I wonder if there's a good source for me to read to get back into 2008 as far as blogging goes...

DEC

2008

Excellent Matt,

I must have missed this post! Trulia is truly gaining widespread acceptance. I just love to use neat new techy tools too! Thanks for the tip.

JAN

Hey Tracy,

Trulia truly is awesome. I love their biz model of syndicating all MLS listings and selling advertising back to the Realtor. The power of YOUR MLS information is truliamazing!

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