ListingWare Blog

Recent Performance Issues

admin — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 10:42:45 +0000

Recently, some folks had been saying they thought our system wasn’t performing optimally. We had noticed the occasional slowness, but couldn’t really tie it to anything in particular. It turns out that one of the switches (the little networking boxes through which all of our servers interconnect) was going bad.

It’s odd that they don’t just fail all at once – they sort of “get sick” first sometimes before failing altogether. We’ve replaced it and things are looking zippy again! Thanks for your patience.

iHOUSE Is Sleazy

admin — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 11:19:32 +0000

I know – if you don’t have anything good to say about someone, don’t say anything, right? But, I’ve held this in a LONG time: iHOUSE is just a sleazy company.

They have been using extremely shady email techniques to deliver their email marketing. I’ve watched this for the last couple of years. Here’s a recent message we received (because a very long time ago, we signed up for a test account with them just to see it):

If you check the FROM address, it seems to be a domain name that was formerly a customer of theirs, not their own domain name. So, if that one gets blocked for SPAM, then they just use another one. I would NEVER use their email marketing service – probably the same techniques. Not legit practices like iContact or MailChimp.

I didn’t really care until now because there’s not much that can be done – there isn’t one true Internet Cop for SPAM. But they’ve now resorted to another technique that I think is pretty slimy too: using the guise of being charitable to win business.

If a company or individual wants to help a person or a group, they should do so without consideration of whether anyone will notice. They should do it because they want to help, not to shamelessly pull at someone’s heart strings. I feel basically the same about the in-show barely-masked commercialization I saw in Extreme Home Makeover this weekend.

So, I’m calling it like I see it. Sleazy. So there.

StudioPress Themes Added

admin — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:59:41 +0000

We’ve just added a bunch of StudioPress themes for WordPress to the ones we already had from WooThemes. That gives over 60 themes to choose from!

Why WordPress?

admin — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 15:10:44 +0000

The first question that I can hear being asked is “Why WordPress?” Of course, we asked that ourselves. For a long time, we’ve offered simple, stripped-down websites that are done in-house, just because some of our customers wanted a basic website to get started. We had never really concentrated on them specifically, they just sorta grew from our IDX services.

I even did a full rewrite and created our own Content Management System in late 2008, trying to get us to a place that was similar to what was possible with other systems at the time. However, WordPress has just become such a complete platform, with all of its plugins, themes, and other features, that we just couldn’t ignore it any longer.

Rather than fight the tide, we’re embracing it! Yes, WordPress is the best platform for managing any type of website! And ListingWare adds to it perfectly.

Eating Our Own Dog Food

admin — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 23:09:01 +0000

One of our deeply-held beliefs here at ListingWare is that we wouldn’t tell our customers to use anything that we wouldn’t use ourselves – the good old “eating our own dog food” policy. So, since we’re about to start offering WordPress-based websites for our customers, we’re switching over to a WordPress-based blog for the company.

We would switch the whole ListingWare website over, but many elements of it are using ColdFusion programming and we’re just not ready to make that switch yet. Someday, maybe – but Not Today, Zurg!