So if someone starts typing words into the search bar for Google, it usually relates to something they are looking for. We call those “keywords”. Let’s give an example. If I am looking to buy a house in Coral Gables, I will go into Google and type “real estate in coral gables” or “homes for sale in coral gables”. Once I hit search, I will be presented with various results ranked by relevance to my search terms. How does Google do it? How do certain websites get ranked higher than others? It’s a mystery to most people, but companies that provide SEO know this.

What exactly is SEO? Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the method of performing analysis and creating web pages and websites so they can be found, analyzed, and ranked based on the content and structure so they can be indexed by various search engines. In case you didn’t get that, SEO basically tells search engines your site is important and relates to what someone is searching for. So in our home search example, if I am a realtor who concentrates on selling homes in Coral Gables and I have a website, I would want my site to appear at the top of the rankings when someone searches for “real estate in coral gables” or “homes for sale in coral gables”. In order for that to happen, I would have to have SEO being done for my website.

SEO is not a onetime thing and its impact is not felt immediately. Usually based on the levels of effort undertaken on your website combined with what your competition is doing with their websites, determines how long SEO will impact you. Typically SEO is a monthly service with companies undertaking various tasks and efforts determined by constant analysis of consumer search behavior and competitor tracking (what your competitors are doing). A sustained, focused SEO campaign will have lasting effects on the quality and level of traffic to your website. Whether you’re selling a product or trying to get new clients, increasing quality traffic through SEO is a win-win for any business.

Now I know sometimes it may not be that simple. Even though WordPress developers make it as easy as possible,  there are some things you should know. Below I list some tips you might find useful when extending your WordPress website with plugins.

What You Should Know

Not rocket science here, just plain old bullet points for you.

• Know before you install – Read the developers documentation on the website or the notes (called a Readme.txt) that come with the plugin.
• Plugins require downloading and uploading to install – Some plugins come in a zip file and you should have an understanding on how to upload it in the Plugins tab or how to upload it to your website via FTP (File Transfer Protocol). Plugins are stored in the /wp-content/plugins folder from your website root.
• Plugins may require modifying WordPress files and templates - Sometimes those really flexible or powerful plugins may require some modifications to your website theme files or even your web host. If you are using a plugin you don’t understand, it might be a good idea to consult your web developer.
• Record modifications – Whenever you make changes to your wordpress theme files or plugins, you should either (1) create a backup before making changes, or (2) comment in the code where you made changes. This is good practice in case you have to go back and undo any changes you made.
• Make frequent backups – If a plugin is making changes to your database or requires modifications to your content and files, you should most certainly make a backup before implementing the plugin.

Manual Plugin Installation

Here is the general process for installing a plugin. Remember, read the developer documentation and make a backup before installing!

1. Read through the “readme” file thoroughly that usually accompanies a plugin, or the website article from where you found the plugin. It is often helpful to print out the instructions so you can check off the installation steps as you complete them.

2. Upload the plugin to the wp-content/plugins folder in your WordPress directory online.

3. Make any changes to templates or files as required by the Plugin instructions including adding Plugin template tags.

Activate the Plugin:

1. Access the Plugin Panel in your Administration Panels

2. Scroll down through the list of Plugins to find the newly installed Plugin (if not visible, start from the beginning to check to see if you followed the instructions properly and uploaded the file correctly).

3. Click on the Activate link to turn the Plugin on.

4. Continue making any modifications necessary from the “readme” file instructions to make the plugin’s actions meet your needs.

TECKpert introduces an affordable website design package for small businesses.

Miami, FL – January 27, 2010 – TECKpert, a web design and development company, introduces its Express Website Design package for Small Businesses which provides high quality, affordable website design.  Built on a full featured content management system, this full-service design package provides a fully customizable small business website with all the features you’ll ever need online.

Recent polls show roughly 40% of small businesses still do not have a website. To address this, TECKpert offers a package that will fulfill the need for an affordable website for new and established small businesses. Whether you’re looking for your first website or to redesign your current one, TECKpert’s Express Website Design package brings you all the features you need at an affordable price.

Everyone wants a high quality website with all the features but sometimes custom designed solutions don’t fit the budget. With TECKpert’s Express Website Design package you’ll get a professional website design with all the features to get your site launched and working for you for as low as $899. The Express Website Design package is packed with features you’ll need to market your products and services effectively. Every website is fully customizable and built on the leading open source web technology, WordPress.  Each website is fully SEO optimized and Google Analytics ready. And TECKpert fully integrates social media features onto each website with live twitter and RSS feeds, a comprehensive blog, and social media sharing features.

Having a professionally designed website for your business should be a top priority. But just as important, you should have it loaded with fresh content and fully optimized to easily drive traffic. With TECKpert’s Express Website Design package you’ll be able to do all that including providing information about your business, marketing and selling your products and services online and creating leads to generate business.

About TECKpert

Based in Miami, FL, TECKpert provides businesses in the South Florida area with a full suite of web design and development services. TECKpert’s goal is to provide web and software development services to companies of all sizes looking to leverage the internet, social media, and online marketing to grow their business. TECKpert provides web and software development solutions to Real Estate, eCommerce, Social Media, and Small Businesses. With a wide range of expertise in Content Management Systems (CMS) including Wordpress, Magento, and Joomla, TECKpert is the solution for website design in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and the Palm Beaches.

Download the full release here

The Social Media Revolution
Here are some interesting facts:

• By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
• Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
• 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
• Years to Reach 50 million users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.

Just watch this video to understand “The Social Media Revolution” and find out some interesting facts you didn’t know.

To start harnessing the power of social media, follow some of these tips:

Create a Fan Page
Using a fan page for creating content and interacting with consumers and client is easy and free. You can use them to showcase new and upcoming products and services which can help you gather useful feedback. A fan page can also be very informative by showcasing what you do. It also serves as a portal on a social network to your website. The most common and popular place to create a fan page is Facebook. If you don’t have a fan page setup on  Facebook, then this should be the first thing you do after reading this article.

Reaching your Customer
Social networks are a great place to reach and understand who your customers are and the best ways to relate your products and services to what they need.

Put up a Schedule of Events
It’s easy and simple to create a calendar of events for all your fans and friends to see. You can post upcoming events in your company, events you are participating in, and events you are hosting for potential customers.

Get People to Help You
Interact with people and get them involved with your business. You can easily talk with friends and customers who are more than willing to help promote you to their network. This is an easy way to get introduced to future customers

Get Useful Feedback
Social media is an ideal forum for interacting with customers and asking them for feedback. You don’t have to go anywhere…everyone is right there! Create a discussion, ask for feedback; the tools are at your disposal.

Targeting your Consumer
Some social networks provide you the ability to run advertisements that target a specific group. You can run ads that are shown to people by location, age, and more. Facebook’s advertising panels allow you to customize your ad, demographic, and view statistics on who viewed and clicked them.

SEO
Creating a fan page that uses your company name can improve your search engine rankings.  Social media marketing should be a part of an overall Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy.

Fellow developers will know that historically we’ve had to rely on a number of regular expressions to scrape a page and while this can most often be fast, it’s sometimes horrendous to read and edit as a TINY mis-write can effectively render the Regular Expression useless. That’s not to say it’s not useful when the hierarchy is small and simple but in today’s world of web 2.0 designs they’re often not.

What is page scraping?

Page scraping is a method that allows you to pull information from a web page, so that the data can be manipulated inside your own script. In your script, you can connect to another URL and request a page, just like a browser would do it. Once you make the request, the web server will send back the page you asked for and your script can manipulate the data and extract specific information.

What exactly does the DomDocument Object do?

If you’re not familiar with the DOM model than the following explanation probably isn’t going to make much sense as there really isn’t too much to say besides, DomDocument transform’s an HTML page into a tree-model of elements.  JavaScript does this upon load and is the entire point to the language: Dom Manipulation.  I find a visual representation often helps to understand the tree model so here is a simplified version of the aforementioned model present in DOM:

The above is a representation of the following HTML:

<div>
    <ul>
        <li>
            <a href="#">URL</a>
        </li>
        <li>
            <a href="#"><img src="#" /></a>
        </li>
        <li>
            <a href="#">URL</a>
        </li>
    <ul>
</div>

Sidenote: If your development background is based on the more traditional languages this will look familiar to you as resembles the Binary Tree, how ever, DOM supports a limitless number of children per node.

Through the DomDocument object we are given to the ability to traverse the nodes, create them, and remove them as we see fit. However sometimes traversing the levels of DOM solely through the methods provided to us by the object is cumbersome and altogether impractical given the depth of the information that we sometimes need. Enter xPath; it is to XML compliant mark up languages what SQL is to databases, a query language. The entire breadth of xPath is outside the scope of this particular post but is covered in depth here. If you’re familiar with jQuery or any other JavaScript framework which supports CSS style selectors this’ll be easy for you.

How to use xPath with DomDocument

We’ll start off with something basic as an introduction, we’ll scrape the “Why us” section of TECKpert’’s homepage.

<?php

// Define our URL & Start Dom Document
$url = 'http://www.teckpert.com';
$doc = new DOMDocument;

// Load the html into our object
$doc->loadHTMLFile($url);

// Alternatively this works too
$html = file_get_contents($url);
$doc->loadHTML($html);

// Now that we've created our dom object proper
// call the xPath object
$xPath = new DOMXPath( $doc );

// Query TECKpert's dom for the 'why us' section
$results = $xPath->query('//div[@class="why_us"]');

echo $results->item(0)->textContent;

Simple to use right? There will be more to come on the onset of technologies associates with XML traversing and it’s related query languages.

Note on this article
There exists the possibility of violating copyright laws using techniques outlined in this article if you misuse data you scrape. Please scrape responsibly.

That’s what we are going to answer in this article.

Having a nicely designed website for your business should be a top priority. But more importantly, you should have it loaded with fresh content and fully optimized to easily drive traffic. Why? Because a website should serve at least one of the following purposes:

• Provide information about your business.
• Market (or sell) your products and services online.
• Create leads (or inquiries) to generate business.
• Be a source of information (i.e. blog) for your specific area of expertise.

Here is a breakdown of how you should approach creating a web 2.0 small business website:

• Plan Your Website
• Choose Keywords
• Write Your Content
• Leverage Social Media
• Build Your Website

Plan Your Website

The first thing you can’t do is get a website because everyone else has one. It has to have a purpose and you have to find out what that purpose is. What’s the objective of your site? Is it to (1) sell a product, (2) market a service, (3) capture a sales inquiry, (4) have someone subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed, or (5) get followers to your twitter feed and Facebook page. Chances are you said yes to most of these. Once you know your objective, you can go about creating your website to achieve what you want. Without this first and most important component, you can’t get your website visitor to do what you want them to and they will be just left wondering “Ok, but I don’t understand how you can help me” as they leave your website. So now that you understand this and you have your objective, the next step is to determine what keywords are important for your website.

Choose Keywords

Before you go off spending countless hours writing content for your website, it is important to find out what people are searching for on the internet that relates to your business. For example, TECKpert provides web design and software development services. The type of visitors we want on our website are the people that are on Google typing “website design”, “website design company” or “software development service”. Why are keywords important? Because they enable your content to be ranked by Google and increasing your exposure on search engines will drive organic traffic to your website. That should be your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy for your business. Organic search results are the results you find in Google that are right under the search bar below the paid advertisements. You want great placement without having to pay Google. To rank well in organic search results should be your main SEO strategy. Remember, SEO is forever while ad placement is temporary (and costs money). So before you begin creating your content, make sure to pick your keywords carefully. Use free tools like the one provided by Google to help you in determining what keywords are right for your business.

Write Your Content

Your website can look awesome. But that doesn’t matter if the content doesn’t provide the website visitor what they came looking for. If you fail to provide meaningful content, your website visitor will simply leave looking for someone else and all that time, effort, and money you spent getting them there would be a waste. When a visitor arrives at your website you have just a few precious seconds to capture their attention and deliver your message as if they where standing right in front of you. You know your business well and how you want your clients and potential customers to see it. Get down on a personal level and abandon that overly technical or complicated message. Keep it simple and straight to the point. Use those couple of seconds you have to capture your website visitor. Remember, good content is what drives search engines. As we discussed in the previous section, you have to include the right keywords in your content. The last thing you want is someone being directed to your site only to leave and never come back.

Leverage Social Media

When you create a web page or blog post, share it. Post it on your Facebook page or Twitter feed. Social media is an easy, free way to get your business out there to a large number of people waiting to hear about it. Setup a blog and let your website visitors read and comment on it. You need to engage your audience. Some of your website visitors will notice you’re on a social network they use and will follow or friend you. Don’t be afraid, that’s a good thing because you got their attention.

Build Your Website

So now you have a good idea what your website needs to do and what you are going to put on it. Now, how do you get your website online? Without getting too much into technical talk, you’ll need what we in the web community call a Content Management System, or CMS. With a CMS you can manage your website content, design, and features. At TECKpert, the CMS of choice today for our small business clients is an open source platform called WordPress. WordPress is one of the most popular blogging tools available. But what many people don’t know is that it is a powerful CMS that can be used for more than just a blog. With WordPress you can build a small business website that years ago would have cost tens of thousands of dollars. WordPress was designed as a platform for bloggers, but you don’t have to use it as a blogging tool. With a few modifications, it can be used to power your website. The fact that WordPress was designed as a blogging platform gives it some great advantages. It is optimized for easily publishing and you can add or update content without having to hire a website design company. And getting good search engine rankings requires fresh, unique content. You need a system that does not get in your way when you want to update your website with a new page, article, image, or video.

Expanding on topics earlier in this article, WordPress provides a strong foundation for:

• SEO – WordPress provides good search engine optimization (SEO) right out of the box. There are a few tweaks you need to make, but there are many SEO benefits that WordPress provides for free.
• Content – it is easy to update content on your website without knowing HTML.  I am sure you don’t want to have to learn HTML and how to use a tool like Dreamweaver. Do you want to have to “ask” your webmaster every time you want to make a small change to your website? Well that is a thing of the past. Once WordPress is set up, you can easily create new pages or edit existing pages using a simple rich text editor.
• Social Media – all your pages and posts can be easily configured to share content on most, if not all, social networking websites. Furthermore, each category you setup comes with its own RSS feed for easy distribution.
• Plugins – There is a large community of developers creating themes and plug-ins. This means you can browse and use great design themes from a large collection, or extend your website with contact forms, a slick image gallery, a shopping cart, or hundreds of other cool features without having to hire a web developer.

Don’t suffer the same frustrations other small business owners experience with their website. With WordPress you don’t have to worry about that problem anymore. Building a website that is designed to meet your goals powered by a full featured content management system like WordPress will set your website up for years to come.

If you want to get a WordPress website created for your small business, check out TECKpert’s Express Website Design Package created specifically for small business. You will get a smashing design, setup, training, web 2.0 features, and a website built for your business. All for a price you can afford.

For the purposes of this post, I’ll be extending on the previous plugin to readily handle more video services: Dailymotion, Megavideo & Vimeo as well as the already supported YouTube. Also, we’ll be adding an option to leave the link but make the video pop up in a modal box using ColorBox.

Okay enough intro…let’s code!

First, we’re going to start off with the basic structure of every jQuery plugin:

(function($){
    $.fn.videa = function(){
    }
})(jQuery)

Note: We use this format for the purpose of ease and using the familiar $ variable, however we can just do this.

jQuery.fn.videa = function(){
   //How ever, within here we can only use the jQuery object,
   // $ is undefined.
}

First we’re going to need the embed code for each service. This is readily
available on their websites as well as the format for their actual flv’s.
I’ve already done this below.

Note: I’ve made use of JSON. If you don’t know about this, read up here.

(function($){

    $.fn.videa= function(){

        var supportedSites = {
            'youtube' : '<object width="560" height="340"><param name="movie" value="[URL]&hl=en&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="[URL]&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="340"></embed></object>',
            'dailymotion': '<object width="480" height="275"><param name="movie" value="[URL]"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param><embed src="[URL]" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="480" height="275" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always"></object>',
            'megavideo': '<object width="640" height="467"><param name="movie" value="[URL]"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="[URL]" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="467"></embed></object>',
            'vimeo'    : '<object width="400" height="225"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="movie" value="[URL]" /><embed src="[URL]" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="400" height="225"></embed></object>'
        }

        var handle = {
            'youtube'    : ['watch?v=', 'v/'],
            'dailymotion': [/.*dailymotion.*\/video\/(.*?)_.*/, 'http://dailymotion.com/swf/$1'],
            'megavideo'  : ['?v=', 'v/'],
            'vimeo'      : [/.*vimeo.*\/(.*[0-9])/, 'http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=$1&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00adef&fullscreen=1']
        }

Next, we’ll need to make use of each utility; this is something that will be used in nearly ALL your plugins. The reason why is because you want the plugin to affect more than one HTML element.

(function($){
    $.fn.videa= function(){
        // We're of course assuming the aforementioned json is here
        // ommited for the purposes of readability
      this.each(function(){
      })
})(jQuery)

Now, for our purposes we don’t actually need to instantiate a jQuery object per <a> element – yet. All we need is the href and class attributes which are easily available via JavaScript’s native getAttribute function.

(function($){
    $.fn.videa= function(){
        // We're of course assuming the aforementioned json is here
        // ommited for the purposes of readability
      this.each(function(){
           var href    = this.getAttribute('href');
           var aClass  = this.getAttribute('class');
           var key     = href.match(/(http:\/\/www\.|http:\/\/|www\.|)(.*?)\.(\.com|\.*)/)[2];

          // we now have the base such as 'youtube' and 'vimeo' in key
          // check if we support it
          if( supportedSites[key] )
          {
          }
      })
})(jQuery)

Now I’ll explain the regex

The first bit:

This matches the http protocol with or without the www or just the www

• ‘(http:\/\/www\.|http:\/\/|www\.|)’

The second bit:
Simply grabs everything AFTER the http://www.

• ‘(.*?)’

The third bit:

This matches against any .com or .* extension

• ‘\.(\.com|\.*)’

The rest is rather straight forward and can be explained in code comments.

// Check if the site is supported
if( supportedSites[key] )
            {
               // Construct properly url to the flv
               if( href.indexOf('http://www.') == -1 )
                        href = 'http://www.' + href.replace('www.', '');

                // Check if we want a modal box
                if( aClass.indexOf('modal') > -1 )
                {
                    // Bind to the click and fire off colorbox
                    $(this).click(function(){
                        $.fn.colorbox({
                            html: supportedSites[key].replace(/\[URL\]/ig, href.replace(handle[key][0], handle[key][1])) ,
                            open:true
                        });
                                return false;
                     })
                }else{
                    // We don't want a modal box so just do the html
                    $(this).before(supportedSites[key].replace(/\[URL\]/ig, href.replace(handle[key][0], handle[key][1]))).remove();
                }

Note: jQuery is a jackhammer, sometimes all we have is nails.

That’s the plugin broken down into the important sections. The end result is as expected. Everything which has a videa class is converted. The modal class is optional (it creates a link that opens a modal box with your video).

As for plugin development, once you understand  DOM and the entire jQuery API, you can pretty much make anything you can come up with. JavaScript support is strong and growing.

The Entire plugin below:

(function($){

    $.fn.embeddedables = function(){

        var supportedSites = {
            'youtube' : '<object width="560" height="340"><param name="movie" value="[URL]&hl=en&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="[URL]&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="340"></embed></object>',
            'dailymotion': '<object width="480" height="275"><param name="movie" value="[URL]"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param><embed src="[URL]" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="480" height="275" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always"></object>',
            'megavideo': '<object width="640" height="467"><param name="movie" value="[URL]"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="[URL]" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="467"></embed></object>',
            'vimeo'    : '<object width="400" height="225"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="movie" value="[URL]" /><embed src="[URL]" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="400" height="225"></embed></object>'
        }

        var handle = {
            'youtube'    : ['watch?v=', 'v/'],
            'dailymotion': [/.*dailymotion.*\/video\/(.*?)_.*/, 'http://dailymotion.com/swf/$1'],
            'megavideo'  : ['?v=', 'v/'],
            'vimeo'      : [/.*vimeo.*\/(.*[0-9])/, 'http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=$1&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00adef&fullscreen=1']
        }

        // Looad in this element for all a tags
        this.each(function(){

            var href   = this.getAttribute('href');
            var aClass = this.getAttribute('class');
            var key = href.match(/(http:\/\/www\.|http:\/\/|www\.|)(.*?)\.(\.com|\.*)/)[2];

            if( supportedSites[key] )
            {
               if( href.indexOf('http://www.') == -1 )
                        href = 'http://www.' + href.replace('www.', '');

                if( aClass.indexOf('modal') > -1 )
                {
                    $(this).click(function(){
                        $.fn.colorbox({
                            html: supportedSites[key].replace(/\[URL\]/ig, href.replace(handle[key][0], handle[key][1])) ,
                            open:true
                        });
                                return false;
                     })
                }else{
                    $(this).before(supportedSites[key].replace(/\[URL\]/ig, href.replace(handle[key][0], handle[key][1]))).remove();
                }
            }

        });

    }

})(jQuery)

First import the following classes from the Google Base Client library.

using Google.GData.Client;

using Google.GData.GoogleBase;

To insert items, you need to be authenticated. Specify your Google Base account name and password to GBaseService as follows. You can use your Gmail account but you have to first sign into Google Base to activate the account.

GBaseService service = new GBaseService("Application Name", developerKey);

service.setUserCredentials("username", "password"); 

The next step is to create the GBaseEntry you would like to insert.

GBaseEntry entry = new GBaseEntry();

entry.Title.Text = "My Title";

entry.Content.Content = description;

It is important to set the ItemType to “Housing”.

entry.GBaseAttributes.ItemType = "Housing"; 

Now set the other attributes. To see a list of all the Google Base attributes go to http://base.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=78170.

FloatUnit unit = new FloatUnit(price, "usd");

entry.GBaseAttributes.Price = unit;

entry.GBaseAttributes.AddTextAttribute("feature", feature);

entry.GBaseAttributes.AddImageLink(imgLink);

entry.GBaseAttributes.AddTextAttribute("property_type", propertyType);

entry.GBaseAttributes.AddTextAttribute("listing_type", listType);

entry.GBaseAttributes.AddTextAttribute("listing_status", listStatus);

FloatUnit sunit = new FloatUnit(sqft, "square ft.");

entry.GBaseAttributes.AddFloatUnitAttribute("square_feet", sunit);

entry.GBaseAttributes.AddFloatAttribute("bathrooms", baths);

entry.GBaseAttributes.AddIntAttribute("bedrooms", beds);

entry.GBaseAttributes.Location = "Address, City, State xxxxx USA ";

entry.GBaseAttributes.AddTextAttribute("mls_listing_id", listingID);

entry.GBaseAttributes.AddTextAttribute("broker", listBroker);

entry.GBaseAttributes.AddTextAttribute("agent", listAgent); 

Finally, insert this GBaseEntry object into the Items feed.

 GBaseEntry ent = service.Insert(GBaseUriFactory.Default.ItemsFeedUri, entry); 

The method service.Insert returns the item you just inserted. The Google Base server assigns pre-computed attributes for your entry such as the creation date and time, the author, and most importantly, the identifier (or URL) of the new entry. The entry may take a few hours to publish so it may not be searchable immediately.

Now you can search for your listings on Google Base by connecting to a snippets feed URL and then interpreting the resulting atom feed. This can be done programmatically by creating a GBaseService object and executing a query on it.

GBaseService service = new GBaseService("Application Name", developerKey);

GBaseQuery query = new GBaseQuery(GBaseUriFactory.Default.SnippetsFeedUri); 

The following query will get single family homes for sale within a 5 mile radius of San Francisco CA.

query.GoogleBaseQuery = @"[item type:housing] [listing type:for sale] [property_type:single] [location:@""San Francisco, CA, USA"" + 5mi]";

You can also set the sort by and order, number of results, and search start index.

query.NumberToRetrieve = 20;

query.StartIndex = 0;

query.AscendingOrder = true;

query.OrderBy = "price(float USD)";

Lastly, execute the query and save the atom feed into a readable xml format. This can be parsed and displayed on a web page.

XmlTextReader reader = new XmlTextReader(query.Uri.AbsoluteUri);

XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();

doc.Load(reader); 

Pretty simple right? Now you can have your listings searchable on Google along with your website.

What’s So Cool about Web Apps?

How about accessing your data and content from anywhere without having to worry about having a specific piece of software installed on your computer? Wish you can access your email from your phone? How about sharing your Facebook status with your twitter account? Web apps are cool because they take care of stuff like that for you.

Here are some examples of web apps you might use:

• Email and Communication: Gmail
• Music: Pandora
• Social Networking: Facebook
• Mobile Application: TweetDeck for iPhone
• Business and Productivity: Basecamp
• File Sharing: DropBox
• Finding Something: Google Maps
• Photos: Flickr

If you’ve used any of these web apps, chances are they’ve made your personal or business life that much easier (or at least more enjoyable). And guess what, all you need is a browser to use them.

With new technologies such as OAuth, OpenID, HTML, and CSS3 combined with open-source software and the release of robust APIs, we will see a new era for web applications.

Enhanced user interface (UI) design, developments in software interoperability, and the need for instant access to information will continue to make the web app a part of everyone’s daily life.