by Jay - The Phoenix Real Estate Guy on November 14, 2006
21,359 comment spams in a little over six months, with most of those coming in the last three months. I’ve gotten comment spam for porn sites, pharmaceuticals, cut-rate mortgages, insurance and more. Over the past couple of weeks it seems that more spam has slipped though my filter. I loath spam and those that deliver it. Spammers are about as low a life form as the amoeba. But they are crafty buggers who are always looking for ways to “improve” their business.
To fight the spammers, I cranked up the sensitivity on Spam Karma 2 a notch. It helped some, but still isn’t where I want it to be. I’m trying to avoid installing a comment “captcha” system, because I find those things incredibly annoying. (A captcha is that goofy “type this number/word/whatever into this little box so we know you’re a human” thing.) Here’s a great blog post by Maureen Francis that expresses my feelings on captchas.
Note to commenters: the increased sensitivity in SK2 may mean your legit comment gets shoved into the “moderate” box. I’ll get your comment moderated as quickly as I can, but it will stay hidden until I do.
So I just armed myself with another anti-spam weapon, it’s a WordPress plug-in called Bad Behavior. It’s supposed to play well with Spam Karma and help squish those pesky spam bots. We’ll see how they do. If the spam continues to be an issue, we’ll hit it with something else. If any avid reader out there notices anything goofy, or sees any spam get through, I’d appreciate a little note (Thanks Jim!)
This is war, and the spammers will not win.
Technorati Tags: Bad Behavior, comment spam, Spam Karma, spammers suck
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by Jay - The Phoenix Real Estate Guy on November 13, 2006
True Gotham hosts this weeks Carnival of Real Estate
There’s some regulars in there, and some not so regulars. I have to admit that I haven’t read all the entries yet, as I spent a lot of time cruising the True Gotham blog. It was my first visit to True Gotham, and let me tell you, this is a winner of a real estate blog. While it does contain some New York City specific things (think co-ops and such) it also provides a WEALTH of other info on everything real estate.
Just what I needed, another blog to add to the reader… but there’s things here I don’t want to miss.
Technorati Tags: Carnival of Real Estate, blog carnival
by Jay - The Phoenix Real Estate Guy on November 9, 2006
There’s a new AVM on the block. Cyberhomes.com from Fidelity is the latest entrant into the fray. It is of course “Beta”. Everything even remotely new seems to be tagged beta. Beta is cool I guess.
They proclaim to have valuations for 100 million homes. I didn’t count them all, so I’ll take their word for it. It is significantly more than 67M the older, more established (yet still Beta) Zillow claims to hold.
So does it work? Sure, sort of. About like any other AVM out there. I checked my house on three of these things, here’s what they said:
Cyberhomes: $392,139. Range:$352,925 - $450,960
Zillow: $395,090. Range: $343,728 - $438,550
RealEstateABC: $392,000 (I couldn’t find a range)
Despite these three each having “proprietary formulas” to determine home value, they all returned remarkably close values. I suspect that’s because they all obviously use the same data. I say “obviously” because each of these three AVMs had either “N/A” or “-” for the number of bedrooms. (I assure you that my home has bedrooms), and each had virtually the same incorrect number of bathrooms (interestingly, one said I had 2 and 2/3’s baths. I’ve never seen a 2/3’s bath). And each had my lot size with identical (albeit incorrect) square footage. They all pulled the same comps as well, missing of course the two most recent comps from just down the street (comps that put the value of our home at closer to $415K)
I will say this about Cyberhomes.com. It had the clearest aerial image of my house of all three. For what that’s worth.
I’m not a big fan of AVMs. I’m not an enemy of them either. Nor am I afraid of them like a lot of agents are. They are what they are. They are chunks of code attempting to place a subjective value on an item. They can’t see the item. They can’t hear the neighbors dog barking, they don’t know just how great the view is. They don’t know all the subtle neighborhood amenities. They don’t know about the red wine stain on the carpet or the body in the closet. They are what they are — a single piece of data in the complex process of home valuation.
Technorati Tags: cyberhomes, zillow, realestateABC, AVM, automatic valuation method
by Jay - The Phoenix Real Estate Guy on November 8, 2006
A couple of folks have asked recently what plug-ins I have installed on this blog. Below is a cut/paste from our plug-ins page listing all the currently active plug-ins that I use. There’s always a couple more activated at any given time as I play around with different stuff. Currently exploring Ultimate Tag Warrior, but I just haven’t had time to look into it’s feature-laden capabilities yet, so I didn’t include it here.
Several other real estate bloggers listed their plug-ins awhile back. Here’s the lists from: BloodhoundBlog, Rain City Guide, RealCentralVA and The Future of RE Marketing. Good stuff…. and you can probably find more lists in the comments.
One word of advice - install plug-ins one at a time, activate them, and look around to see if anything is broken. Some plug-ins don’t play well together. If something is broken, don’t panic, just deactivate the plug-in and that will probably fix it)
My favorite plug-ins: Spam Karma (this or Askimet is **essential**), Database backup (I’ve never needed to restore the database, but I’ve come *very* close to imploding this thing and am glad it’s there), Sidebar Widgets - not really required as you can always cut/paste code, but widgets are very cool.
Technorati Tags: WordPress, WordPress plug-ins, plugins
by Jay - The Phoenix Real Estate Guy on November 7, 2006
Unless you’ve been living in a cave the past two months, you know that today is election day.
I hit the polls at 7:00am and was out by 7:30. If you think you need to whine about taking 30 minutes to vote, remember the guy in Iraq that walked for 20 hours to get to a polling place. It could be a lot worse. (sorry, can’t find a link, but it’s out there)
BlogArizona has some good linkage to stuff on candidates and the propositions.
Cameron Swann (14 year old Son of BloodhoundBlog) gives some sage advice that older voters would do well to heed.
Maricopa Mark has an interesting idea on how to pick a proposition.
I’m not telling you how to vote. I hope I don’t have to tell you why you should vote. Just educate yourself and vote. Arizona has the longest ballot in the country, there are some important races and important propositions. Freedom is a wonderful thing. The right to vote is a wonderful thing. Enjoy your freedom and exercise that right today.
Technorati Tags: vote, arizona propositions, election day
