Hello there. It’s been a few weeks. We’ve been busy and are really excited to release REpurposedApps into the wild. This project was built as a tool for members to recommend apps that they use and add comments to already existing apps. We’ve had a great group of beta testers helping us hammer out the bugs and offering suggestions. We have an amazing group of Showcase members who will be curating lists of apps they think are worth your time. The great thing is that as long as you’re a member of NAR, you are a part of this conversation.

Typically, the apps being recommended are not real estate focused and that’s a good thing. What we’re discovering is that members are really thoughtful in how they can apply these apps to their workflows. Recommendations we’ve had have ranged from weight loss apps to

You get to shape the content and what’s happening on the site. To start, you will need to create an account here. Once you have that account, you can recommend apps and comment on the already existant apps as you’d like. We’re also interested in feedback. Definitely let us know your thoughts at @crtweet and use the hashtag #REpurposedApps when you. Thanks!

This concrete roofing tile includes an embedded catalyst in the upper portion of the roof tile that acts like the catalytic converter on your car. The catalyst speeds up oxidation in the presence of sunlight, reducing nitrogen oxide emissions. Boral says 2,000 square feet of this first-of-its-kind product covering a roof mitigates the same amount of carbon dioxide as one car driven 10,800 miles.

Concrete tiles have the benefit of being durable, recyclable and some are even Energy Star rated for efficiency. BoralPure tiles can be installed either on new homes or to replace an existing roof.
Maybe someday that roof over your head will also be the one giving you a breath of fresh air.

Note: Laura Stukel has been a champion of sustainability and won the 2012 Green Industry Advocate award from NAR’s Green REsource Council. Her post on Gen Y Buyers is in line with the reasons CRT is promoting sustainable technologies: New buyers are excited by them and want them. Thank you, Laura, for your writing, and your dedication to sustainability.

It’s Earth Day today and all this week, we are going to be covering sustainability topics. What better way to kick off the celebration than by participating in NAR’s Green REsource Council? As CRT looks to the future, we believe that the more information that our members have about sustainable technologies, the better. The best way to kick start you on this path is by getting NAR’s Green Designation. Here are some of the benefits you get with this designation:

• Access to customizable members-only marketing tools to help you build your business and gain a competitive edge
• A comprehensive understanding of what it means to go green and the concerns of consumers seeking green knowledge about real estate
• Valuable real estate education that differentiates your market focus and broadens your abilities in the eyes your clients, prospective clients and associates
• Enhanced ability to participate in the green real estate market
• Ongoing specialized training and exclusive designation benefits and resources that help you stay on top of green real estate issues and trends
• Placement in 4 directories:
  • realtor.org
  • realtor.com
  • greenresourcecouncil.org
  • greenhomeguide.com

There are three courses that can be taken online:

1. Green 100: Real Estate for a Sustainable Future
2. Green 200: The Science of Green Building
3. Green 300: Greening Your Real Estate Business

The courses run for $130 each or you can get a discounted bundle at $339.00 for all three.

In honor of Earth Day and in partnership with the REALTOR Benefits® Program, NAR’s Green REsource Council is running two specials:

• 25% off each Green Designation Course: This flash sale discount is available on Earth Day (April 22) for purchases of Green 100, 200, or 300.
• 25% off the Green 100-200-300 online bundle: This sale is available throughout the month of April.

Find out more about the Green REsource Council and how you can participate. It’s full of tremendous resources in this emerging field. As we move forward into the future this knowledge will only serve to add to your value for your clients. Thanks for listening and have a great Earth Day.

A Cone: V3 Solar’s CoolSpin – Solar

Solar tech has made amazing progress in the last few years. One product that turns the idea of solar panels on its head is the V3 Solar CoolSpin. It’s not flat but cone shaped. As you see in the animated gif, it sits under glass and spins in place. This motion allows it to keep cooler than a normal solar panel that sits in the sun all day. What’s more, the design of the glass concentrates the light onto the solar cells, allowing it to harvest more energy. One of the interesting claims about this tech is that it can produce energy at a cheaper cost than what comes from the grid. As this is yet to be ready for the market, we will have to wait to see how accurate these findings are in real world application.

Why Does This Tech Matter to You?

Having an eye on this type of technology advancement means you can talk to your clients about where they could realize cost savings with their home and increase its value. If there is a technology that produces power more cheaply than what they’re already paying and you’re aware of it, this is a great value add from you and they’ll be grateful.

A Ball: The Soccket – Kinetic

Kinetic energy devices are where I think the most gains could be made for members. They rely on you and your motion as the energy source. The Soccket (coming soon) was developed for emerging countries without a traditional energy infrastructure. It’s a soccer ball that will power an LED light for 3 hours after only a 1/2 hour of play. In the future, (the not too distant future) this technology could be applied in a number of current products we use today. Car tires, bicycle tires, bags and shoes. Can you imagine charging your cell phone by walking?

Why Does This Tech Matter to You?

As our devices become more and more a part of our lives and need power, companies are going to look to methods for charging that will make it easier for us to remain mobile. Imagine a cell phone that charges with the motion of your walk as it sits in your pocket. Imagine riding a bike to charge your tablet. Or the motion of your car’s wheels runs the auxilary power within the car.

For your clients, a sOccket could be an interesting gift for their kids. They could play with it during the day and have the power they’d need for a nightlight in their rooms. There’s a great deal of movement in your daily life. When technologies such as the Soccket are applied to that movement, your personal power needs will easily be met.

A Puck: Epiphany Labs onE Puck – Stirling Engine

Coming in the Spring of 2014, the onE Puck is a device that will charge your mobile devices using the heat or cold of your drink. It’s an oversized drink coaster that contains a Stirling engine inside. Essentially, a Stirling engine contains a gas that’s heated or cooled which causes it to make the cyliners in the engine move. Though this technology has been around since the 1800’s, it hasn’t found a lot of practical applications in our daily lives. Epiphany Labs hopes to change that with the onE Puck.

Why Does This Tech Matter to You?

This technology could be applied to things like meeting tables, so as your meeting, you could have a place to set your drink and plug your phone into. NAR’s Director of Digital Engagement, Nobu Hata, and I were speaking about this device, and what he mentioned was that a major car manufacturer is looking at putting these in cup holders to as a way to keep your devices running. Someone could go another step further and build this right into cups and mugs with batteries and you’d create a backup battery for your device as you take your water bottle with you.

The Shape of Things to Come

The goal of this post was to give you a thumbnail sketch of what’s coming in the very very near future and how it could impact our lives. Each one of these items are built from technologies that have been around for decades, even centuries. With the rate at which our technologies evolve and become even more efficient, they will become ubiquitous. What problems could these technologies solve for you? Do you think you can use these when they’re available? Are there any other technologies you’re aware of that fit this realm? Let us know in the comments. Thanks for reading.

In August 2011, CRT was charged with re-thinking the technology that was behind realtor.org. We were determined to implement technologies that were freely available and built on open standards. One area we were really excited to move into was the area of Responsive Web Design. We did a lot of research and review of what information and materials were available. At that time, there were not many organizations that were using these principles. The Boston Globe launched in October of 2011 and that was about it for larger organizations and Responsive Web Design.

In April 2012, a revamped version of realtor.org launched using Responsive Web Design principles. The largest factor for us moving in this direction was that we anticipated the increase of mobile usage on our sites in the very near future. We were right. In 2010, 3% of visitors to realtor.org were using mobile devices. As of today, we are seeing 25–30% of our visitors using mobile devices. That’s a huge leap. As CRT continues to work on sites at NAR, we will employ these principles on all web properties.

Please note: what follows is meant to be a very high level overview and there will be subsequent posts that will cover more specifics of these principles. The intent here is to help make these concepts a little more understandable so that if you are looking to have your site redesigned, you can understand what this concept is just enough to be able to talk to your designers and developers. First, let’s talk about what Responsive Web Design is not.

What Responsive Web Design is NOT

In talking with people about Responsive Web Design, I’ve come to find there is a lot of confusion about it. Here is a list of what it is not:

• It is not a method for communicating directly with people who visit your site, like a chat client.
  • The word responsive is loaded and causes people to believe that it has to do with action they have to take. The truth is the word Responsive in ‘Responsive Web Design’ is referring to how your site’s code interacts with your device. I’ll go into more detail in a bit on this.
• It is not a way to be notified when someone views your website
  • If you received a notification every time someone visited your site, you would go crazy. There would be a constant pinging that would be worse than the already huge onslaught of email and communications we get on a daily basis. Thankfully this is not Responsive Web Design.
• It is not an app built for a specific device.
  • Responsive Web Design doesn’t care what device you have. It’s main goal is to get what is important to your target audience.

What Responsive Web Design is

Responsive Web Design is a concept first proposed by a designer/developer named Ethan Marcotte in May of 2010. Ethan was influenced by another designer/developer named Luke Wrobleski who wrote about how moving forward, designs for web applications should be done with consideration for mobile. He called it Mobile First. Wroblewski cited the rising number of mobile devices and usage of these devices as core drivers for his pitch.

Using Mobile First as a base, Ethan demonstrated the concepts of Responsive Web Design in this article. The crux of it is that there are three things to consider:

• Fluid widths
• Flexible images
• Media queries

Fluid Widths & Flexible Images

I’m covering both of these items together because they have similar principles. Both items refer to the fact that as a container narrows, the item within that container resizes to fit appropriately. Please note I am writing this for all readers and not just technically aligned readers, so I will keep this at a high level. The basic idea here is that all the parts of your website are contained in boxes. In a traditionally built website, these boxes have fixed dimensions that stay the same no matter what device you have. In Responsive Design, the idea is that these boxes will resize to work for specific orientations.

It might be best demonstrated with these images. Below, you will see what our new site, REpurposedApps, looks like on a desktop.

All the boxes are a uniform size for the content and it has a width typical of a website today. The site performs exactly as you would expect in browsers.

Now watch what happens to the same site on a phone:
What you’ll note here is that the boxes have resized to fit the proportions of the screen, including the images for the apps. Because of my different device widths, the website transformed its look and feel to an appropriate dimension. But how did it know?!? AHA! Enter media queries.

Media Queries

Media queries are new to HTML as of the last version (HTML5). As a member, you won’t need to know anything about these other than you would want your site to work on all devices at different orientations.

At a high level, media queries essentially ask a question of your device. That question is ‘What width would you like to view this website in?’ Your device’s browser answers this question simply by passing its orientation to the site. The site then gives the browser the appropriate code. There are tons of media queries for developers to choose from, but these are the main ones for the task at hand. A beautiful proof of concept can be had at Matt Kersley’s site. Matt built a way for you to view multiple versions of the same site at different widths. The link above is set to open realtor.org in different device orientation windows. On that page, if you scroll to the right, you will see all versions of realtor.org.

Why Should it Matter to You?

Let me start by saying why this matters to us. You, the member, are on your mobile phone or tablet a lot. We recognize that and want to offer an experience that works for whatever device you have. My point being is that you need to consider your audience for your site. For a lot of your clients, this is their first impression of you. If they’re accessing your site on a mobile phone and it’s not responsive, that might be the end of the conversation for them right there. Following these principles will demonstrate consideration for their experience.

We also did not want to think about building native apps for a few reasons:

• We wanted something that was device agnostic.
• We wanted a lean code base.
• We wanted to demonstrate something the members could have done on their sites for little to no cost.

End of Part 1

I’ve covered an awful lot in this post and would hope that you take a moment to absorb and view the reference links. One link I think you should visit to see what a number of sites are doing is mediaqueri.es. You’ll see a number of examples that could come in handy when wanting to create your own site.

Okay, end of post.

Coming up, Part 2: Challenges and Priorities.

Finding good alternatives was more difficult than you’d think. The free service of Google Reader quickly dominated the landscape when it was introduced in 2005. This had the side effect of killing much of the RSS development over the next few years.

I should probably admit at this point that I’m probably one of the reasons that Google killed off Reader. Much of the speculation around Readers death comes down to the fact that Google couldn’t monetize the service. I never really used the official Google Reader web UI, instead I used Google Reader as cloud storage of my feeds and article read status but used native clients such as NewsRack for my Mac and Feeddler RSS Reader Pro on my iOS devices for actual reading/interacting. There was no easy/good way for Google to toss ads in my face.

The good news it there are were some alternatives out there waiting for their moment in the sun. During my research, just a handful seemed to rise to the top as the ones with the most potential: Tiny Tiny RSS, Feedly, and NewsBlur.

tl;dr version: I ended up on NewsBlur. In the rest of the article I’ll talk about why I ended up there.

Like any tool selection, you should pick what works for you, not what works for anyone else or what someone else is using just to keep up with them. Hopefully my exploration will point you at things to try, but don’t use NewsBlur just because I do, use it because it becomes the right choice for you.

For me, any thing I would switch to would need to allow me to continue the behavior of a cloud-based backend and native clients use as much as possible.  None of them allowed me to continue exactly as I had, but I’ll discuss each in turn.

Tiny Tiny RSS

Tiny Tiny RSS is an open source web application. It looks good, but you need to host it yourself. No problem if you’re like me, a geek who can set up LAMP servers in his sleep, but there is no hosted option. (That said, if I can avoid doing some work by having someone else host, I will.)
There is an Android client that interacts with it, but currently no iOS clients. Since I’m only rocking iOS mobile devices these days, I continued to look elsewhere.

Feedly

Feedly has existed for awhile and billed itself as “A Better Reader” and is a more attractive front-end that is dependent on Google Reader. Shortly after Google’s announcement, Feedly announced they would develop their own backend by the July cutoff so they could continue to run their service after Reader goes away.

I personally perfer a more traditional “e-mail like” RSS interface over what feedly gives, so I didn’t gel with Feedly after trying it for a few days.  Also, I don’t believe they have yet cut over to their own backend, so its hard to talk about it as a replacement for Reader as we don’t know what the performance and functionality will be like.

Building an RSS reading backend is trickier than it first appears and to make a scalable service between mid-March and July is possible, but a daunting task. I hope they make it as I think rebuilding the RSS ecosystem will need folks like feedly, but it just wasn’t for me.

NewsBlur

NewsBlur started as a side project of Samuel Clay as he wanted a better RSS reader, and in March 2012 he received funding to make it his full-time job.  Along the way he incorporated social features, an iOS app, an Android app, and ran a respectable small business.

All that changed the day of Google’s announcement as NewsBlur had massive capacity problems when he went from 1,500 daily users to 50,000. He wrote a great blog post that talks about the challenges that popped up in the three days after Google’s announcement and lays out a three month plan to scale it out. Even if you’re not interested in RSS, its a great read from the software/service developer perspective.

NewsBlur has more of the traditional RSS reader layout that I like.  Free accounts can only sync up to 60 feeds, but if you become a premium user it goes to unlimited. Premium is currently only $24/yr. It also has social features that I, among others, missed when Google pulled them out of Reader to push people towards Google+. The iOS native client is quick, works well, and has a nice “swipe for the next article” interface when you’re reading a feed.

One of the unique features NewsBlur has is training.  You can teach it per feed what articles to emphasis and which to hide. This is really useful on very busy RSS feeds, especially ones where only some of the content is relevant to your interests.  For example, on the Joystiq feed, I have it highlight things that are tagged with XBox, PS3, and iOS as those is the gaming platforms I care about, and i have it hide articles that only tagged Android as that currently is not among my gaming interests.

Besides being a good RSS reader there is one other thing I really like about NewsBlur: even as a paid service, Clay is keeping it as open-source and says he’ll always keep it that way. He doesn’t have to it, but I like that he is. That’s good news for continuity in case he decides to go the way of Reader.  For now, I’ll gladly pay the $24/yr.

I received a note from David Conroy who took the Pi and merged it with another project I am working on (the RAMCO EZ-API) to build a cost effective integration device between your Association Management System and other systems. David has an excellent description of setting up a web server (yep a LAMP server) on the Pi. If you are a RAMCO customer, you will find his write-up on accessing the RAMCO EZ-API from the Pi equally well written.

If you have been following my posts lately, you know I have been work with node.js. David inspired me to post an article about running node.js on the Pi. First, read the article posted by Jerry Sievert regarding node.js on the Pi. Here are the only things I would change in his article:

The necessary dependencies I found his step #2) can be resolved with:
sudo apt-get install git-core vim

Here are the commands I use for the “administer your identity” comment Jerry references in his step #2. Also it explains my installation of vim above. Any editor will work, I just use Vi out of habit.

>git config --global user.name "Mark Lesswing"
>git config --global user.email mark@lesswing.com
>git config --global core.editor vim
>git config --global merge.tool vimdiff


I used node.js version 0.8.22 because many of the modules I’m using in other projects are published for version 0.8.x. You can deviate from Jerry’s instructions because there is no need to patch this version. I created a separate directory so that I did not clutter up my home directory. Here are the commands I used:

>sudo mkdir /work
>sudo chmod 777 /work
>cd /work
>mkdir projects
>cd projects
>mkdir raspnode
>cd raspnode
>git clone https://github.com/joyent/node.git
>cd node
>git checkout v0.8.22 -b v0.8.22
>./configure
>make
>sudo make install


You should definitely get a cup of coffee for the “make” step. It takes quite a bit of time (an hour and a half) to build. If you are not used to building things from source, you will see quite a few messages like the following:

If you follow the simple, getting started code from the node.js site, substituting the IP address and port you want, you will have a web server! Here is the code I used, but remember if you have node.js running as well as the LAMP server David posted about, they will fight over port 80, this is why I used port 8081. I used the IP Address given by our DHCP service so naturally, it is not public-facing:

var http = require('http');
http.createServer(function (req, res) {
res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'});
res.end('The Pi Emerges in Real Estate with Node!\n');
}).listen(8081, '10.20.4.142');
console.log('Server running at http://10.20.4.142:8081/');


Start the server with:

>node example.js

If you enter this URL from a browser, you will be talking to the Pi:

http://10.20.4.142:8081

Here is what you should see:

• Hosted on a different server than the node.js service
• I have an account there that I have ensured can deliver mail through before I try it with node.js
• The SMTP service is setup to follow RFC 2746 (actually ESMTP)

The first thing you should do is use the npm utility to install the Nodemailer module into your node.js setup:


>npm install nodemailer


Now for a small piece of standalone code that uses Nodemailer:


#!/usr/bin/env node

Although e-mailing from code is something we have all done at some time in our careers, I will still point out a couple of things:

• You can send html and plan text versions of you message at the same time. Nothing earth shattering here, it is part of the example though.
• The createTransport call to Nodemailer is where you find the most problem. That is why I pointed out that you should have a working SMTP facility before you begin.
• The mailOptions array can take a single or multiple address (comma separated)

This post is not as interesting as some of the previous topics, but e-mail notification is still a part of our lives and hopefully I saved you a few minutes of searching the web for guidance.

In a previous post, I discussed the concept of using node.js as a WebSocket server. This approach is characterized by many smaller node.js servers, each providing information to separate WebSockets. The user experiences the data through an HTML5 webpage. It is natural that the next topic of discussion would be persistence. There is a wealth of information that can be found on the web regarding node.js and robust SQL databases like MySQL, so I will not duplicate the information in this post.

In keeping with the “smallness” of specificity of purpose of the approach, I will now discuss the use of SQLite in conjunction with node.js. The source code for SQLite is in the public domain, so it is a good mate for node.js.

The first thing you need to do is install the node.js module for SQLite. If you have already installed node.js which included the npm tool (I covered this in a previous post) you need to execute the following from the command line in the root of you project directory:

sudo npm install -g node-gyp
npm install sqlite3

The node-gyp module is a dependency of the sqlite module.

Now let’s look at a quick code example:

#!/usr/bin/env node

"use strict";

//
// includes
//
var fs = require("fs");
var sqlite3 = require("sqlite3");

//
// only continue if the database exists
//
var repository = "./repository/crt_example.db";
fs.exists(repository, function(exists) {
if (exists) {

//
// open the database
//
var db = new sqlite3.Database(repository);
var stmt = "SELECT nrdsID, firstName, lastName FROM members";
db.each(stmt, function(err, row) {

//
// print out results
//
console.log(row.nrdsID + " " + row.lastName + ", " + row.firstName);

});
db.close();
} else {
console.log("Database does not exist, run broker_node_init.js first.");
}
});

The each function is self-explanatory, so I would like to talk about the all function. Let’s consider the case where you need to determine of any results came back. Look at this code fragment:

var stmt = "SELECT systemName FROM communicator WHERE lastMessage='AUTHENTICATED'";
db.all(stmt, function(err, rows) {
if (err) throw err;
if (rows.length == 0) {
console.log("Hey, there is nothing Authenticated");
} else {
//
// do something with the authenticated crowd
//
}
db.close();
});

Another common use case is issuing SQL calls that depend on previous SQL results; in other words, the order of SQl calls is important. If you have been experimenting with node.js, you will appreciate this next sequence. The event-oriented nature of node.js takes some getting used to but here is how to use serialize():

var db2 = new sqlite3.Database(repository);
db2.serialize( function() {

//
// first call
//
var stmt = "UPDATE communicator set systemName='" + aMessage.account + + "',lastActivity='" + (new Date()) + "' WHERE ipAddress='" + connection.remoteAddress + "'";
db2.run(stmt);

//
// second call, not dependent, but order is important
//
stmt = "SELECT nrdsID,firstName,lastName FROM auth WHERE systemName='"+aMessage.account;
db2.all(stmt, function(err, rows) {
if (err) throw err;
if (rows.length != 0) {
rows.forEach(function (row) {

//
// third call which depends on the results of the second
//
var stmt = "UPDATE communicator set systemName='" + row.nrdsID + "',lastMessage='AUTHENTICATED'  WHERE ipAddress='" + connection.remoteAddress + "'";
db2.run(stmt);
}); // each for iterating the results
}
db2.close();
}); // all for the auth table
}); //serialize db

The serialize() call ensures that the underlying SQLite database executes the AQL in the proper order.

Hopefully this persistence discussion was helpful.

We are now at a point where we are looking for beta testers to help us shape it and carry it the rest of the way.

For this project, we are looking for people who are heavy app users and are using regular non-real estate intentioned apps in their daily workflow. We are looking for creative uses of these apps as well.

Taking a page from the Google Glass application process, here is what we need you to do:

1. On Twitter, post a tweet with why you would be a good beta tester and your favorite app and add the hashtag #REpurposedApps to the tweet.
2. Follow @crtweet so we can direct message you if you’re selected.
3. You do NOT have to fly to New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles or pay us $1,500 to participate.

NOTE: Applicants must be a member of the National Association of REALTORS®.

We’re asking that you help us get the word out. Please share this link or retweet the original tweet.

The first round for the application process will end on Sunday, 3/10 @ 6pm EST. We are excited to get this beta test going and get other people outside of the project involved.

If you’re not selected, no worries. This is only the first round of beta testers and we may issue more calls in the future. Our goal is to go live with REpurposed Apps around MidYear. Thanks for listening, and we look forward to reading your applications.