William

All things in time.  Thank you for sharing the remarkable video clips from last year's vacation. 

Hello Ed, it was fun and hope you enjoyed them as much as I did seeing all this. It was a cruise that wasn't so planned, sort of just fell into it. Glad I took it though. Magnificent to see.

I'm getting ready to launch my new Tomato site soon too!  Yours is great and so are the videos!

Congratulations Cindy. Jim and his crew are marvelous and a real pleasure to work with. I didn't exactly tell him I cancelled my vacation to create the site but he doesn't need to know that,lol I think the trade off was great! There is always next year. Good  luck with the site and the classes if you are taking them are great. Great information and empowering! Thanks for the compliment on the vids too, they were fun to do. I should do more of them.

William, Those shows take my breath away!!! Absolutely stunning. I can't even imagine how it must of felt to be there. Thanks for sharing and good luck with the new blogsite.

Hey I jusy went and checked out your blog. Really, really nice. One of the best layouts I've seen yet. Impressive and very unique.

Thank You Bryant so much for those great comments and the compliment. I should have been a photo journalist. nah! I'll keep my day job. Many Thanks again.

Thank you William for the journey...it's the closest I'll ever get! It was beautiful(and your choice of music was perfect!)

Thanks Joan. I am so glad you enjoyed it. Good memories. My assistant is on vacation so I'm not getting one this year. As a budget choice, I quickly traded it for the site.  With the right music and the travel channel, it is a pretty good substitute and it only lasts a couple hours, No packing, no rushing around and no air travel to get sick on. Accompany me on my next travel destination on the travel channel. Do you get that station? Great programming. Happy Summer.

Hey William, Any way Jim could make the pages turn on your blogsite just like a book? That would really be awesome. A page for each post. 

William - What awesome photos.  I especially enjoyed your captions on the first video.  Absoli=utely elowuent.  God truly did shed His Grace on America.  His handiwork abounds and what a perfect place to view it in Alaska.  Working on your business this year will surely pay off with great dividends and many more vacations to come!

Hi Bryant, I already thought of that . Regretably Jim said that it would require Flash embedded and the blog part of the site will not work with flash. Whatever all that means but that is what he said so we gave up on the idea.

Hi Marlene, I hope you had a nice 4th. I mostly worked on research for upcoming articles. It can get a bit hairy when you want really good information to be in the post. Jim, my mentor and instructor  says be credible and provide some good stuff your subscribers will have an interest in. I got noticed by the Wall Street Journal today. Very cool. They entered my site numerous times. 

I worked on one article yesterday for over 4 hours. I had no plans to do anything special so that is how I spent the day. I needed some time to do things that I can't do and handle business at the same time so yesterday was the day to do it.

Looking forward to seeing everyone in Del MAR-Did you RSVP? We should have fun.

Oooo...loved all!  Good job with the pictures and shows and going the extra to promote yourself with that professional bookish type blog. WooHoo!

William - Beautiful! It must have been an amazing trip! Your blog looks great and noticed by Wall Street, too. Congrats!

Hi Woo Hoo Sally,

I thought it might be fun to have these vids available somewhere in the site. I didn't put them all there I picked my 3 favorites.  I got an e-mail that your site was coming up slow. I just learned how to put the html in the site, now you want a link, lol

My next lesson it to use del-icio.us. Should be interesting. Always wonderful when I hear from you.

All the best.

William

Hey Paula  So many thanks. Jim was impressed with the WSJ checking me out. Hopefully they like what see.

How was your 4th, I didn't do anything but work on research for a blog I am working on. Hoping I can get posted soon and move on to something else,lol

Let me know if you need help with anything-though i suspect you are further along than I am. But always willing to share anything I can help with.

All the Best

William - love the new blog site - and the videos of last year - just think with all the new business you'll get you can plan a special one for next year - best of luck with it all.

Hi Cyndee- Thank you so much for your comments and I always appreciate your thoughts. I am so pleased that it is getting some attention and I already have a few subscribers.  

Awesome visuals William!  A Breathtaking Journey Indeed...

Thank You Jason.  The weather was unusually perfect for the whole trip and the visuals were awesome. It was as though no human had ever been there. It hasn't by the very nature of the location been over developed. More, the many small towns that knit together a sort of perfect network of community and visitor alike. Magnificent. It was a pleasure to bring it you.

William

Beautiful shows and beautiful blog site, William. Awhile back I found the most incredible website at my Librarything community. It was a book similar to your blog site. I was so impressed with it I bookmarked it and thought it would be a great idea for a real estate webiste. And here you are doing it !!!  Wonderful ! I will have to read it more later today after I have had my oatmeal and listened to a few more crow messages.

oh, here is the website i was speaking about, thought you might like it since you clearly love things of a literary nature~

Bibliobuffet 

Your blog shows just what can be done when this idea is used in a real estate website. Beautiful. 

thanks for being the caring person that you are William and I hope you have a wonderful weekend.

Jo 

William - I just caught up and found this blog!  Thank you for featuring my hometown, Juneau!

It is a wonderful place to live, although it would feel nice to get warm.  Weather has been in the 50's so far most of the summer.  Makes it a drag to work in the garden.  Feels like fall already!

Anyway, I appreciate you capturing our area on a sunny day and reminding me why I live here.  Hearing, and reading what other people have to say about Alaska, specifically Southeast Alaska, helps me through the rainy days.  Again, you've reminded me how lucky I am to be here!

Hello JoAnn-Thank you so much for sending me the link to the website. I forwarded it on to the designer of my site. Who knows ,he may have seen it already or was even inspired by it. I was sure there was not another sight like the one my designer did for me, Wrong!

My Dad used to say there is nothing orininal new on earth because if it exist, the French already did it. I suppose back when he was growing up, it might have seemed that way. Today, there is all sorts of original ideas, the only difficuulty is that ideas are contagious and before executed, 10 more other variations are already done.

Thanks for your very nice comments. They are so appreciated.  

Hello Debbie,It is just so amazing to me that of all the people who could view the site and given the small number of people in Juneau, that my little montage found it's way to the right person. That has enlivened in you a spirit and a grace. A feeling of comfort and resolute satisfaction that you own a piece of the splendor that exists. To see and to have lived with such treasure will make your responses in the world unique.

William -  The good news is I only have to work half a day today, and it is partly cloudy.  We might see something over 65 today!  Yippee!  Next week I get to go to another small town in a float plane to preview and list some properties too.  Thank you again for reminding me how lucky I am!

William, i believe there are likely lots of websites around with a 'book' theme. Afterall, 'bookmark' kind of falls right in with the concept of books only in cyberworld.

I am a big fan of Jorge Luis Borges and his 'Book of Sand' site is another similarly based website.  Of all of them though, your's is the coolest in presentation and content. For one thing, the colours used in yours are amazing.

I would say your site is unique in the real estate world. 

ltr allgtr

Jo 

Dear Debbie, You are not lucky. You are blessed! Accept the charge given to you to relect the magnificent gift through what you will accompliish in your life. It was given too you as a tool-use it. Make it come alive for others through your voice , your vision and your vitality.

Sincerely,
william

Hi Jo-Anne, I had never given thought to that in quite that way. Of course you are so correct and I really appreciate the grounding in reality. I most appreciate your locating these site and sharing hem and I am in no way displeased that I wasn't the first. Nor will I likely be the last,lol. I feel fortunate that others have made the site so popular in such a short few weeks. I feel a certain responsibility to deliver content worthy of the design. I have a profound respect for the literary. I have a great love for knowledge. I have limited expertise in both but will continue to grow and hopefully in the end measure up to the profound greatness that has always existed in both realms.

Thank you again for enhancing this post your inspiration and aspirations.

William

One final comment before i go out to dinner,. William. You are very welcome. I am glad you enjoyed seeing these sites. They are two of the thousands of bookmarks I have ((-:  Somehow, in my oceanic memory, I was able to find them pretty quickly.  I thought you might find some ideas on them to incorporate into your site, hence I posted them here for you. Another idea that I have seen somewhere , just can't remember which site it was now, was a book like you have and like the literary site uses, and when you click on another page, the pages of the book actually turn as if they were real pages of a book turning. Very kewl way to present other pages of the website. Maybe your web guy can do something like that on your site.

I would say you are doing extremely well in the knowledge department. Your blog is excellent reading.

Jo 

Jo Ann, Ornithological  Species Of Identical Plumage have a Tendency to Congregate in Closer Proximity. Birds of a Feather. I thought of that and the designer said it would take Flash to do that and the  search engines ( spiders and crawlers) do like it on blog sites. In a regular web site there seems no issue. I wanted that feature in the worst way but he said no and I accepted it.  But thank you for that creative idea. We do think alike.  :)

Do you have any idea how I get smiley faces to appear on this site. I tried to download them and attach and no luck. I didn't want to add a picture.

Very nice blog, know wonder you didn't make the trip this year. I am sure your memories of Alaska will last a lifetime.

My goal is to get to Alaska soon. Within the next three yea s would be nice.  Great tour...

Thank You Jay for your comments. It was a wonderful trip and the weather was so unusually warm and sunny. The whole trip was like living in a fantasy world of natural splendor. Hope you get there according plan. I was invited on this trip by family and I hesitated , then threw abandon to the wind and went. The magnificent vistas and the unspoiled land made it so worthwhile that I would recommend to anyone. Photos will never do justice to this great land. My visualisation was that it would be a frozen tundra and it was anything but. On the sea plane trip into the Fjords and seeing orca whales in their natural environment and not being able to see them on the photo was a my only real disappointment. Otherwise a near perfect trip.

William, I love your Real Estate Textbook!  Regards.

William,

i may be a subspecies of the ornithological species you fall into. I think I recognized your call at someone's blog, hence had to do further investigation.

ahh. Yes. I had a momentary lapse in cognitive power and forgot that your site was a blog site. It looks like a website. In fact, it looks better than most websites I have seen. Amazing what they can do with blogs these days.

I regret I am not an html expert hence can't help you in the smiley dept.  The way I do it is to save the image to my picture files and then insert it.

  This is one I saved just now. Generally i am not big on those yellow round smiley faces. I do my own version of the smiley which is my dyslexic subtype. I found it one day when i was having one of my dyslexic moments then it stuck   ((-:    . I could never figure out why everyone and his fifth greatgrandfather removed all type smileys  like  :-))  .  My brain is wired in an opposite manner so it is difficult for me to even wrap my neurons around the common smiley.

 why didn't you want to insert an image?

anyhow, back to deciding what kind of oatmeal to have this morning. I see the sun just rose.

jo 

William, i asked Teri to come over and help you with your smiley problem. She seems to be pretty good at this smiley issue. She even has animated and dancing smileys on her comments.  hm

ltr allgtr

jo 

Good Morning Jo Ann, I took the night off last night and decided that my blogging needed to take a rest. When I logged in a few minutes ago, I was pleased to see you had commented again and  answered my question about the smiley's. 

My intent in the new site was to have the full functionality of a web site ( the core items at least), searching for homes, listings and contact info, about me, testimonials, web ads , community info, etc.  One of the fun features is that when you click on any of the 3 colored ribbon navigation buttons, the book changes color (Purple, Blue and Green). No big deal really but I definitely wanted the book to have some life and they accommodated that in the design. Thank you for your nice comments about it. How the book and the site RealEstateText Book came to be was not by chance. There was something that inspired it and I am doing a article on it. It might even be a bit revealing about me,:),haven't decided that part as yet.

I used to use a site with animated character smilies and inserted them in most of my e-mails. They had them for any category or subject one could think of. The were not just the head of the smiling, they had been full automated and action features.  I thought they were cute. The was even a REALTOR Smiley. Usually not smiling, lol. The site itself tuned out to be giving my hard drive issues so it was deleted. I wondered if others had that problem. So I had no more smilies available to me. ( nor pictures of them).

Being a newbie in the daily writing dept, I sometimes work my self into stressful situations of feeling that I must perform Part of the reason for taking the night off was a reminder to me that must not substitute quantity for quality or I will would have no reason to expect people to  stay with me and watch me grow into what I hope will be as a recognised writer of style and substance.

Thank you again for the real effort you have  made to communicate with such a wonderful dialogue. When one looks at most articles comments it is a one or two line response, " very nice, great post blah blah blah. When one looks at the comments section of my posts, there are comments sections bigger than many of the stand alone posts. To me that , this optimizing and building a relationship. That is what I am interested in and will strive to attain it. Most important to me is to be credible and write with passion, style, and allowing emotions (the good ones) to bring about even more substance with passion.

Being a work in progress, it is always difficult  to gauge if I am on track.

Dear Artur, Thank you soo much. I appreciate your nice sentiments

William, I will more carefully review your post, but for now, Jo-Anne has asked - not you - for the "how to do it" on the smileys I do. Log on to: http://www.smileycentral.com/. Upload the stuff, and you will now see in your browser, a smiley central face. When you want to add something to a blog or comment, just click on that face, select what you want, and point and click. You can also select the option to turn it "off" after you point and click so the window goes away. Drop by and let me know if you can't figure it out, or call me and I'll walk you through it.

Meantime, I'm going to read your post. Looks interesting. Just checked your new blog out. Very nice. LOVE the colors! 

LOVE it, Teri. The Lady in RED. This gets more fun by the day! Thank you so much. I had smiley central downloaded once and it caused problems. The software I use for virus control doesn't like it and created havoc. My Tech person said that it was spy ware and people just didn't realize it. I have a new Tablet PC and will try it again as so many people seem to use it and like it. If creates havoc this time, I'll just deal with again, but in the interim, Ill have some smiley's for awhile. Many Many Thanks.

Hi Teri, It took a great deal of turning off virus protections and allowing adware, and malware but I got it on. I   have to go back and turn all that stuff off again. William

Good for you William.  Glad you were able to use it. I think I had to weed through some of my virus, etc. as well. Enjoy.....

Next, you ought to stop over at: http://www.glittermaker.com/ and pick out a name like I did.

Hi Teri, Well actually I no longer have access. I could get the changes to the virus software to accept it. It demands that the software site is malware and will not function with the virus protection tuned on. I tries changing the settings and the computer just keeps rebooting. I will continue to get the the settings straitened out with my tech support company tomorrow. Thanks again.

William, I look forward to reading the article you are going to write about the inspiration for your RealEstateTextBook .

I'm with you on taking time away from blogging. Oftentimes a flash of a story will come to me . I may be out driving or daydreaming out my window at the mourning doves on the fence outside. Then suddenly this flash of inspiration will hit me and the bare bones are there, the story only needs fleshing out. I don't see writing as something that can be forced.  Of course, one can always write a localism post pretty easily by doing the requisite research and filling it out here and there with a bit of mental imagery and descriptive metaphor. Somehow that is not what I am talking about though. Real writing comes from the heart. It just kind of appears already formed.  Definitely we need time outs. Time to just daydream, be silly, feed our souls.

Did you ever read Julia Cameron's 'The Artist's Way' ? It is the best book, IMO, out there on feeding that creative soul within. 

I would say you are definitely on the right track. Your writing and comments are filled with 'passion, style' and those good emotions .  Keep up the great work !! I look forward to reading more.

Jo 

Jo Anne, Thank so much for that wonderful review and insight into writing from the soul. I have read a score of the reviews and the book sounds most worthwhile. I smiled when I saw advertised the CD version. I have an ipod and and as often as I can, I listen to music and also to recorded books. My eyes tire sooner than my brain when reading and the CDs allow me to fantasize while feeling the impression of the writer as opposed too just imagining it. In particular books that inspire a re-energizing of ones self. Many thanks for your suggestion.

When I was very young, a book that I read inspired me to seek excellence in my self. It was "Promises to Keep" by Agnes Dooley. Tom Dooley's mother. It drew out a new impression of the compassion I am capable of. When I was given that book it touched me in ways that most others did not. I realized that I have an ability to also touch the souls of many. It empowers me with strength and a measure of responsibility to at least try.

Many Thanks for sharing this.

That's a great idea, William.  I have never thought of listening to books on cd. I do sometimes take cds out from the library of an inspirational nature. I think the last one was my favourite health guru Andrew Weil.

I have never heard of the book 'Promises To Keep'. I will have to do some research on it as the only thing I know about Tom Dooley is that song 'hang down your head Tom Dooley'. My brothers are both musicians (on the side) and play and sing that song. They both have excellent voices. Maybe that song is about the same Tom Dooley ? You see I am Canadian so maybe do not know about Tom Dooley because from the very quick google search I did today, I see he was a Doctor and involved with politics. I don't know his whole story though . His Mother was a writer, hmm. I will see if my local library has the book. My curiosity is piqued now.

Yes, I do see that you are  a very compassionate man who is capable of touching the souls of many, as you put it. Very accurate indeed.  Do you like Paulo Coelho's books? He is likely one of my favourite authors. 

Hope your evening is going well,

Jo 

Hi JoAnn, The only book that I have even read a review on of Paulo's is the Alchemist. I have read excerpts from it. He is an excellent writer and I should have read more of his works. He is a passion and soul enhancing style that earns him rave reviews. Perhaps I will have to get a couple of them and read them and allow them to bring some new insights into my life from his perspective. Many Thanks.

William, this is the last comment i will be placing under this post. ((-:
To be honest, I did not enjoy The Alchemist that much. It was ok however I enjoyed The Zahir much more and my favourite book of his is more like a little manual on life called Manual of the Warrior of Light. I think you would really enjoy it and that is the one I would recommend most strongly to you.

Bye for now

Jo 

LOL, Hi Jo Anne, I have that title noted and put it on my list at Amazon.com I didn't realize it but I signed up as a dealer for Amazon.com. I can sell books to others and earn books for myself. I don't even know how the program works because I sort of signed up because someone asked me to. So when I put it on list, they said I needed x amount of volume before they ship,LOL .  To funny. I will be in all likelihood, BUYING the book,lol

(((-:

ok. so i lied.

Jo