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More updates to ActiveRain last night...

Some of you may have already noticed but we made several updates to ActiveRain last night. Here's a quick rundown of what they are...

1. We added two additional catagories that blog entries may be posted to "Advertising a Listing" and "Other Advertisement. While we didn't exactly intend for people to use the blogs to post these item, people are. So by offering specific catagories, we hope it will keep them out of other public catagories such as "For real estate professionals". In fact it won't allow you to add posts that have been marked as "Advertising a Listing" to the other catagories.

2. We added the ability to mark posts as being regional to a specific state/county/city. We are in the process of building a number of new ways to view information and news by region. Simply tagging a post with names of the regions wasn't going to work, as well as being hard to understand. So if you are writing a post that is about a certain region, please select a region appropriately. While there may not seem to be a benefit of doing it now, there will be a big one in the future...

3. We added an archive of blog posts by day. The main purpose of this was to help search engines in indexing blog posts (less clicks from the front page), but it also is a pretty cool view for seeing everything talked about on a specific day. It can be found at http://activerain.com/blogindex and is also linked to from the blog dashboard.

-Matt Heaton (ActiveRain CEO)

Posted by ActiveRain Real Estate Network on 09/19/2006 12:43 PM

Comments (34)

activerain, activerain updates, activerain features

34 Comments on More updates to ActiveRain last night...

SEP

2006

I was just going to look for the explanation of the new drop down choices. Just what do you guys have up your sleeve?

All the updates look and work great. Good call on organizing the posts by date. Be careful not to put too many links on one page... You will probably have to sub categoraze everything at one point.

Another idea would be to site map all the blogs according to keywords.

Love the blog archive. It's nice to get a little summary of the day's blogs on one page.

Like CRENs comment above me, I'm wondering if too many links on one page might be a SEO red flag. But you guys are far more SEOaware than me... SEO aside though, a long list of dates might not be the best solution from a users perspective.

Stomp grapes to make wine.

Excellent stuff, Matt. I was wondering how you were going to better segregate many of the obvious "regionally oriented" blogs from the mainstream postings. Good idea!

Rich Jacobson, www.KitsapLife.com

Great work! It is really amazing to think back and see all the evolution that has happened here in such a short time.

Thanks for the update and improvements. I'm glad you're leaving the city and county as optional on the regional posts. However, what if I have a listing that I think ActiveRainers in other states (that tend to buy second homes/condos in Florida) may be interested in? Will ActiveRainers from outside of Florida be able to search for these listings that may make ideal vacation homes/out-of-area investments? That would be ideal.

Great ideas once again. I have been working to get my blogs indexed but what i am doing isnt working...I hope these new updates will improve that. Thanks for the updates guys!!

Fabulous...I plan on doing it right now. Thank you Active Rain!

We are going to build an area to easily browse through different types of postings by region. So if you were interested in finding information on Seattle, WA you could easily do that.

CREN and Jay, yeah the number links is a minor concern to me, but not major since I don't really care about the index page itself ranking high in the search engines. I just want the search engines to be able to make it down and index the posts easier, kinda like a sitemap. Right now our main blog browsing interface is so dynamic that, I think posts can often get overlooked.

We'll definetly do something to make browsing by tags easier, maybe I'll work on that tomorrow.

Not to say search engines don't index and like us already, we got nearly 1500 visitors just off of Google alone yesterday :) But I think the site can do even better...

I am curious to know how many leads people will get from advertising listings.

Great ideas and they will help us sort ..

Matt: you wrote...

<<So by offering specific categories, we hope it will keep them out of other public categories such as "For real estate professionals". In fact it won't allow you to add posts that have been marked as "Advertising a Listing" to the other categories.>>

Perhaps I misunderstood... I just published a blog post to advertise one of my listings and it came up under "All" blog posts. Am I seeing it there because I am in that region (Florida) or can every AR member view it as well? I thought it would only be viewable by Florida members. Is this correct?

Nope, right now there is no filtering on regions when viewing posts. "All posts" shows everything regardless of catagory or location. We are in the midst of building ways to browse posts by region.

Matt, the blog archives is just awesome!!! Excellent enhancement. Thanks

Matt, I went back to some of my older blogs to see if they were categorized byt region...some where some weren't. Should we go back and check to see if our blogs are orgized by regions? Do you think it would help any if we did?

Active Rain gets better day by day. Love the new categories that will keep listings and advertising out of the regular blogs.

Awesome i cant wait to utilize these new features!!!!!!!!!!!

Matt, I noticed the archives this am, great addition. Will there be a search feature for the advertised listings? Say, I'm looking in Florida?

Ahh, that explains the rise in property listings today. Thanks for the continuous improves you guys are making.

Questions/Suggestion...have you considered an exclude option on viewing posts. I normally don't use the filters because I don't want to miss any blogs so I always choose the "All Blogs" channel, rather than selecting each channel individually. But with the inclusion of listings, can there be an option to exclude the listings if a viewer chooses? Perhaps set up an general user options page where people can customize things somewhat (e.g. exclude certain types of blogs, add a blog signature, etc). I know it may not be practical for you...just wondering is all.

I am new to the network but am so impressed with the quality, and quantity of activity here, and the opportunities for learning. But in particular it is great to see this site evolve and improve over time. Your new features make lots of sense, and I'm sure we can expect more, right?!

Great work with the advertising link. I hadn't thought of adding listings, but with the rapid rise of my Active Rain blog in the search engines, it only seems logical. Anything to get a property sold!