Scott Lewis: Real Estate

My Online Real Estate & Tierra Madre Realty

A current project that I'm spending a lot of time on is developing website hosting tools for real estate agents. These tools allow agents to integrate listings from the local Multiple Listing Service into their websites. People searching for homes can get more of the information they're looking for. And it's branded by the agent, increasing their prospects and clients.

The project is in an early state of development, but you can see the initial work at:

My Online Real Estate (the hosting and development service)
Tierra Madre Realty (my first client)

I'm Back

I started this site several months ago. At the same time I registered Radio Userland, I also downloaded an evaluation version of Frontier. My plan was to purchase Frontier and use it for my real estate project.

After a few months using it, I've changed my mind. Mostly I just don't want to run Windows server:

I don't know anything about Windows adminstration and I'm not interested in learning. I already spend way too much time trying to keep up with security issues on Unix.
I already have a lot of Unix server power that needs to be used.
The Windows server needs a lot more babysitting. The Unix boxes just run on their own once they're configured.

I realized that I already have server solutions that I'm happy with. What I want is a good weblogging desktop program. That's Radio. What I need now is better integration of Radio with the other tools I use: Zope, Plone and dadaIMC.

Radio Userland vs. Frontier?

A couple of people responded to my rant about Userland, asking if Radio wouldn't work for my projects instead of Frontier. Well, since I'm not very familiar with either product, so I don't know.

I have two projects I'm considering Frontier/RU for.

The first is a project with a group of 60 eighth graders. I'm a volunteer and technical consultant for them. Their teachers and I are planning a group web publishing project. As part of that, I'd like each student to have his/her own weblog.

The class has its own intranet with about 10 computers. Radio seems like it would work fine, except that it is geared for an individual user creating a single weblog. I'd like any student to be able to edit his/her weblog from any computer. Some people have suggested using categories but it doesn't seem like it would work well.

The second project is for real estate brokers and agents. The local Multiple Listing Service is offering access to their database of property listings. I can bring that data into my own database and sell services to brokers, giving them full search capabilities on their own websites. I already have a prototype implemented in Zope.

However, I'd like each client to be able to maintain a weblog-like page or pages on their site. Zope has some weblog products, but none are as mature as Radio/Frontier/Manila. So I need to be able to write scripts that make xmlrpc calls and weave the results into the webpages. My impression is that Radio uses the object database on the user's computer and publishes static pages to the hosting computer. I need a dynamic application running on the webserver. So it looks like Frontier.