Sacramento Home Journal

John Lockwood
June 6th, 2007
Listings
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At the risk of disappointing my throng of fan (singular intended, and don’t think I don’t appreciate it, Jeff), my map output has been a little off lately. However, the good news is that with all the distractions from software development (like really getting paid to be a real estate broker, which kind of sucks up my time being my “day job” and all), I’ve managed to do a fairly decent update to the listings database that underlies most of the content here (and on two or three other web sites).

Granted this is all underneath the hood, but you might find that some of the pages are showing a lot more listings than they were. Of course, the down side is that now that we’re starting to have a non-trivial amount of data in the database, I need to put on my MySQL database admin hat to get the speed back up to what it was. Do I have a MySQL database admin hat? I guess I do now. Indexes are your friend. Or to be pedantic about it, indices are your friend.

The good news is that I now have about three months of recent active listing data, along with about a year, for Sacramento, Placer, El Dorado, and Yolo Counties. That’s about where I wanted to be as a baseline, so now I can just do an update every few days to stay current. That means I can focus a bit over the several weeks on some other tasks, to the extent that work doesn’t cut a whole in my whole day.

Does My Development To Do List Really Belong on the So-Called Internet?

Yep.

Some of the other tasks ahead include:

• Fixing up the neighborhood pages, like this one, so they’re not in a cheesy development state. Break out the actives from the solds and show more of everything, while at the same time adding some listing maps.
• Creating a UI where users can add points of interest for Sacramento, and to jump start that, begin by inviting local bloggers / webmasters to add their blogs.
• Advertise (or “feature”) your listing would be a nice touch. Who has time?
• Get some better front ends going for pages like our main city page. A zip code map for the whole county is fairly trivial but also likely to be somewhat fat. If it is fat, that could be solved by just mapping centers instead of outlines.
• Before or after fixing what a main city list looks like, wire El Dorado, Yolo, and Placer County as well. I’m thinking that rather than spinning off most of these to existing county web sites, we might put it all up here, and do a sort of hyperglobalmeganet deal on it. And then of course…
• Flesh out the neighborhood database for those counties as well, and add more for Sacramento.
• Clean up the CSS all over. The look and feel so far is pretty amateurish.
• If I get the writer new hire I’m hoping for, work with her on how the neighborhood or city level content all fits in. If you get the UI right for the user adding points of interest feature, that’ll help.

So far this project reads more like a wish list and is seriously in need of some project management. Darn it — project manager hat. Granted, 2,000+ pages or so of long-tail search content probably works pretty well even if it’s cheesy, but having a killer Web 2.0 app running at the root or in a directory somewhere wouldn’t hurt a bit.

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