Feisty Fawn and VPNC
By klard | May 15, 2007
It is things like this that really make me wonder if linux can ever make it as a desktop replacement. The current version of Ubuntu was released with a known bug in vpnc 0.4.0. It appears that when using vpnc to connect to a Cisco easy vpn solution the dead peer detection drops the vpn tunnel after less than 1 minute. Now I was using vpnc on Edgy for months and never had an issue, after I upgraded to Fawn a few weeks ago I never could get the vpn to stay up long enough to accomplish anything. I thought for some time that the PIX I was connecting to was having some issues because at times in the past vpnc 0.3.3 would eventually cause the pix to hang and I would have to have it rebooted. Come to find out the current version of vpnc shipped with Fawn had a known flaw, yet it was released in the distribution anyway. Nice going.
The bigger issue is how to fix it. There are some instructions here about downloading the vpnc source and making a change. However, you have to enable “universe” in /etc/apt/sources.list in order to get the source. Then of course there was some problem trying to update the rules in binary and I kept getting this error “make: dh_testdir: Command not found” which I never was able to overcome. Then for awhile I tried to dpatch the source as it appears there is a patch included in the source, which of course there are no friggin instructions on how to do it. In the end I removed vpnc 0.4.0 and reinstall vpnc 0.3.3 using this package, with the caveat that I need to watch my updates and make sure 0.3.3 doesn’t get overwritten until it is fixed.
What a cluster. I consider myself reasonably well versed in some of this stuff, I cannot imagine a regular user trying to overcome the hurdles that are put out there even with the most user friendly distributions.
Topics: Linux, Security | No Comments »
Modifying GPSMAP
By klard | April 22, 2007
GPSMAP comes as a part of kismet which I started using before I went to the SANS Wireless training in Orlando but have been using much more since. I specifically needed the functionality of gpsmap to create a scatter-plot of geo coded web addresses for houses that are in foreclosure in our area. The first scatter-plot can be found at Tampa Real Estate which I created using the base gpsmap and labeling the points as open when I created the xml file. What I need to do next is to create a new color coding function for the map points so I can separate the points on the scatter-plot by month. Thank goodness for open-source software. I will post the changes I make along with a sample when I am done.
Topics: PHP, Web Design | No Comments »
Major Update to Real Estate Page
By klard | September 16, 2006
Have you ever taken on a task and when you got deep into it asked yourself “what was I thinking?” I recently took on the task of updating the Tampa Real Estate website and ran into that question. It started out as a server upgrade….we purchased a new web server from Dell for the site with the idea of moving some of the other sites we manage to the old server. Then the thought was, hey we shoud do a layout, css, and color upgrade while we are at it….slowly it built….then we decided we should validate the css and html through the w3c site for at least the major design elements since there are something like 60,000 pages total on the site. Wow, I had no idea just how bad my code was 2 years ago….suffice it to say that I have learned a ton in the last 2 years about developing, particularly with php.
So we go through that whole process….fix validate…fix validate..etc. Once we get all that done we bring the site live and notice that our error log is 66 meg in just a day….ouch. The process begins anew., the errors are primarily in using literals in php……so we go through the headache of fixing most of those errors. BTW I research everything, and for those people who advocate turning off notify in your php.ini instead of tracking down the errors and correcting them…..I say bleh to you.
I am happy to say that after 2 solid weeks of work I am about 50% finished fixing all of the ugliness I created. I read recently that some google developer said that no matter how good their algorithm gets they cannot account for people’s incompetence when developing sites……now I know what he meant.
Good luck and hopefully better coding.
Topics: PHP, Web Design | No Comments »
Real Estate online lead generation - Google
By klard | August 29, 2006
This might be slightly off topic for this website, but it most certainly pertains to web site design and Google so here goes. The money that funds this site and all of the hardware and software that support it come primarily from real estate. It is a one hand washes the other scenario, I develop a website that generates leads for the real estate business and the real estate business pays hosting fees and buy servers for me to play with so that I can build better websites to generate more leads….and so on. I have recently been doing some analysis of where leads come from, how they are generated, whether or not they are organic, etc with the help of Google Analytics and of course analyzing the physical data…ie sales. What I have determined is that despite the best marketing efforts of sites like homegain and lending tree and all the spammers that solicit my web business daily, sales generated strictly from online leads have an ROI that is no better and evidence suggests possibly worse than traditional marketing efforts.
Just to give you an idea of what I am talking about let me give you some information to support my assertion. My data suggests that pure online lead generation accounts for approximately 25% of sales, note that we are on the first page for our primary keyword “(city) real estate” for a google search and we also rank very well for a plethora of other keyword phrases…so I am talking about a well developed site with good optimization and good backlinks. To get that 25% of sales we spend 40% of our total marketing budget on things like hardware, software, hosting and on occasion outside development (which by the way is very expensive and only worthwhile for targeted projects). This 40% does not account for any outlay for inside development work, if inside development was factored the ROI would be considerably lower.
Traditional marketing efforts including post cards, magazines, newsletters etc account for approximately 35% of total sales for the company. These efforts may also factor in to online efforts from the standpoint that a postcard may drive traffic to the website that may eventually turn into a sale. These types of sales are very difficult to track back to post cards and we are working on ways to more closely track this data including using tracking numbers on post cards so that when the user visits the website they can be associated with the postcard instead of being labeled a “direct visit”, once again Google Anayltics will help tremendously with this effort. The 35% of sales generated by traditional marketing accounts for another 40% of our marketing budget.
The other 20% of our marketing budget accounts for 40% of sales…you might be wondering what this could possibly be. Marketing to past clients. It’s pretty simple, marketing to past clients is fairly cheap but generates a significant portion of sales, we simply send them cards and magazines bi-monthly and their additional sales and referrals help the bottom line by 40%.
The bottom line….despite what lead generation websites and email spam tell you, having a balanced marketing plan is the best way to spend your dollars. Also, unless you are going to go all out and spend $12,000/year or more on a website, do not bother with these guys that are going to “get you leads” for $49 dollars to start and $50/month. Your website will be invisible to anyone not looking for you specifically, what I mean is it will not be found in a search for anything meaningful. If you just want to have a web presence find a real estate template and throw something up on a $9.95/month hosting plan and walk away. Thanks for tuning in.
Topics: Google, Web Design | No Comments »
Google Maps….Global Ajax Radio Buttons
By klard | August 25, 2006
I spent the better part of a day trying to figure out how to get a few radio buttons representing some limits on rent prices to integrate with my google maps code. It turns out I was over-thinking it. I got the impression from reading a ton of infomation that I needed to set up an event listener inside the onload to listen for the radio button click. As it turns out all I really needed was to listen for a global event. I am inserting the code…without once again doing a good job of linking back to where I found it. The original code that I modified for both the java script and the html was found here. I have some notes at my office and will be able to clean that up later. Here is the code.
The html code that adds the radio buttons and calls the javascript:
<form method="get">
<p align="left">Rent Less Than</p>
<ul class="formlist">
<li class="rent"><label><input type="radio" value="1000" name="radios" />
onclick="return radioClick (event)" /> $1000</label></li>
<li class="rent"><label><input type="radio" value="1500" name="radios" />
onclick="return radioClick (event)" /> $1500</label></li>
<li class="rent"><label><input type="radio" value="2000" name="radios" />
onclick="return radioClick (event)" /> $2000</label></li>
<li class="rent"><label><input type="radio" value="100000" name="radios" />
onclick="return radioClick (event)" /> Any</label></li>
</ul>
<input type="hidden" disabled="disabled" size="10" class="notify" name="notify" id="notify" />
</form>
And the javascript that handles the event (reminder this is placed outside the onload function)
function radioClick(e) {
var obj = eventTrigger (e);
var notify = document.getElementById &&
document.getElementById ('notify');
if (notify)
rent = obj.value;
getMarkers();
return true;
}
function eventTrigger (e) {
if (! e)
e = event;
return e.target || e.srcElement;
}
After that it is just a matter of adding the rent number back to the query and adding thatas part of the mysql query.
You can see all the code by going to Orlando Rentals and viewing the source.
Topics: Google Maps Mashup, Web Design | 2 Comments »