March 21st, 2011
Wow! Time sure does fly! It seems like only yesterday that we announced the launch of our new web service called RealtyNinja which makes awesome websites for the busy real estate agent. The reason I am writing this post is because I noticed that our last post was almost 5 months ago!! And one thing I always tell my clients is that a blog can be a good thing, but if you let it go stale, it can do more harm than good! So here is me updating the blog to keep things ‘fresh’ and also to let you all know that RealtyNinja is getting more and more awesome as the days go by. We have added a whole bunch of amazing new features and plan to make it the best real estate agent website creator in the industry. Check it out for your self:
Posted in BaseTools, Business, Cool Stuff, Martial Arts, Our Work | No Comments »
November 4th, 2010
I had about 30 domains I need to create basic zone files for and did not want to do it by hand. I found that you could do the following via the command line:
for i in `cat /root/domainlist`; do /scripts/adddns --domain $i --ip xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx; done;
/root/domainlist is a file that contains a domain on each line without the www. and of course replace xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx with the real ip address:
domain1.com
domain2.com
domain3.com
Posted in Tips & Tricks | No Comments »
November 4th, 2010
I looked all over the interwebs for this and all I could find were articles on redirecting www to non-www or vice versa. Which is essentially the same thing.. but I figured the web deserves an article dedicated to just this.
The first server block sets up the redirects and the second block is what you are redirecting to. Pretty straight forward. Just make sure to /usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx -t (or where ever the nginx binary is) before you try to restart as you may accidentally enter some funky characters.
server {
listen 80;
server_name secondarydomain.com tertiarydomain.com www.secondarydomain.com www.tertiarydomain.com;
rewrite ^(.*) http://www.primarydomain.com$1 permanent;
}
server {
listen 80;
server_name www.primarydomain.com;
# config for primary domain here
}
Posted in Tips & Tricks | No Comments »
June 29th, 2010
Hello Everybody,
We’re super stoked to announce that we are officially launching RealtyNinja, our new pay-as-you-go real estate website service.
http://www.realtyninja.com
We have spent the last 7 years building custom real estate websites for some of Vancouvers finest REALTORS® and found ourselves solving the same problems over and over again. We also found that most agents can’t justify the high price tag of a custom site and the cost/effort involved in keeping it up to date; not to mention the fact that a lot of agents do not need or are not prepared to take advantage of everything a custom site provides.
What really spurred the development of RealtyNinja was one of our oldest clients and friends Neal Uchida (http://uchidarealestate.com) of Blu Realty. He had been telling us for years that agents were not happy with the existing subscription based website providers and that we had a golden opportunity to take the real estate tools and experience we spent years developing and create the system that is now known as RealtyNinja. We set out to create something that the market has never seen before, a unique software-as-a-service company based on the principal that less is truly more when it comes to websites and applications. A lot of our inspiration came from the likes of 37signals and their first book ‘Getting Real‘. With RealtyNinja we are not trying to out-feature or under-price our competition, we are instead instilling our creativity, personality, technical edge and curiosity into a product that is focused on saving an agent time and helping them generate leads. We would rather spend our time building one killer feature that will without a doubt benefit your bottom line, than 5 half-assed features that just take up time and confuse the end user.
RealtyNinja will not be the perfect fit for everyone and we are OK with that because as soon as you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one. The brand is edgy and the software is opinionated, but so are we and so are the agents that will fall in love with RealtyNinja. No website is perfect, but we constantly strive for perfection and that’s what counts. One of our biggest strengths is our agility; the ability to implement new features in a day instead of a month or to embrace a new technology if we feel that it will benefit our customers. By choosing RealtyNinja you can be certain that you have a a group of Ninja’s behind the scenes ensuring that you have the best website, the most effective features and that you are leveraging the web to its maximum potential.
On that note, we’re going to get back to building some wicked and essential new features into RealtyNinja such as niche market functionality, brokerage level accounts and the ability to create sub-pages. Thanks for taking the time to read this and have a nice day.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
March 26th, 2010
In line with my last blog post, I am re-evaluating my relationship with the people I follow on Twitter. I started out on the right track by following those people I was genuinely interested in and then I started following anyone who followed me because I thought it was the nice thing to do. I came under the impression that it was rude not to follow someone who so kindly followed me and then I started thinking that to get more followers you have to follow more people. This has resulted in me never reading anyones tweets no matter how interested I am in them because I have to wade through a swamp of random, useless (to me) tweets.
I am now going on a twitter followee cleanse and un-following anyone I am not actually stoked to hear from. This may result in a backlash where I lose followers myself, but I don’t really care; quality not quantity eh?.
Posted in Business, Musings | No Comments »
March 26th, 2010
I am torn on how I should handle comments on this blog. Should I disable comments all together? Should I only show the positive comments? Should I reply to comments? It is also difficult to tell which comments are authentic and which comments are from people who really don’t care about what you write, they just want their comments picked up by search engines or get a comment approved so that they can then spam you.
What is the point of blog comments? Are they just badges to hang on your site that say, “Look at how important I am, people are commenting on my blog”? To be honest, I think that is how I have been treating them up until now. After giving the subject some thought, blog comments in my opinion are for turning a one way dialogue (blog post) into a 2 way conversation; be that between blog author and commenter or between commenter’s themselves. With this in mind I am now going to make an effort to reply to every comment on our blog. After deleting the obvious spam comments I simply do not want to spend the time contemplating whether a comment is authentic or not, so I am just going to accept and comment on them all!
Let’s see how this experiment goes. And please don’t get me wrong, I really appreciate the time that anyone takes to comment on something that we write.
Posted in Business, Musings | No Comments »
March 2nd, 2010
Here are some shortcuts I use on an almost daily basis that I constantly forget and then go re-read the blog post. I have taken them from an old post but added a new one:
Bulk add:
svn st | grep ^? | sed 's/? //' | xargs svn add
Bulk remove:
svn st | grep ^! | sed 's/! //' | xargs svn rm
Strip all .svn directories from project:
find . -name .svn -exec rm -rf {} \;
Edit the ignore file pattern list for the current directory with the specified command line editor (don’t forget the last dot!):
svn propedit --editor-cmd vi svn:ignore .
Check in (commit) local changes to repository with the supplied message:
svn ci -m 'the commit message you want to use'
Posted in Tips & Tricks | No Comments »
February 25th, 2010
I am a big fan of breaking large projects into bite sized, easily manageable pieces. Call them phases, stages, parts or what have you; it is all the same. The point is taking something that has a deadline far in the future with a million to-do items and turning it into something that has short deadlines with easily managed and concise deliverables. To effectively accomplish this you have to sit down and have the big picture discussion with the end goal clearly in mind and plot your course to completion; this is where I find lots of projects get tripped up. Even if you have broken it down into 2 week deadlines, you still have that looming 3 month deadline and waste time on the overhead of having to meet deadlines to meet other deadlines.
This is why I like to use the Phase Now and Phase Later approach. Why not have that big picture discussion and compile a list of concise, clear deliverables and then sort it in order of priority. Once you have done this, put as many priority items as you can in comfortably manage with a short deadline (couple weeks) in a separate list and call this Phase Now; everything else is Phase Later. Get the most important stuff done first and then keep moving down the list from there. Of course this does not work for every project and in every instance, but I have found that things tend to get done quicker and lots of time is saved by not having to implement unimportant details upfront.
Posted in Business | 3 Comments »
February 7th, 2010
Last Monday I had the horrifying experience of having my wisdom teeth removed. I was out of commission for two days straight and when I tried to come back to work on Wednesday I was confused and useless, after which I promptly developed dry socket and was again incapacitated. Suffice to say, it was as if I had vanished from the office for a week with no warning and no contingency plans in place. The effect it had on our company was of epic proportions for a company our size; absolutely nothing!
Do you know what this means? It means that we are one step closer to nirvana and passed a test that could have easily been very detrimental to Base-10. This does not mean that we can all go on sabbatical, but it does mean that what we have created is stronger then ever and will continue to grow. It is not about the individual, it is about the team. I spend more of my waking hours with Ramin, Thorsten, Negar, Fredrick, (anyone else I work with) etc, then I do with my family and I do not regret it, for they are also my family. In my mind Base-10 exists to enrich the lives of the people around us because this is what they have done for me. Who would have thought losing my wisdom teeth would give me such wise insight?
Posted in Business, Musings | No Comments »
December 16th, 2009
I am not sure how many people know this but martial arts are deeply ingrained into base-10’s culture. Collectively base-10 has over 40 years of martial arts experience in a myriad of styles. Thorsten has trained for 15 years, Ramin for 12 years and I (casimir) have trained for 15 years. The styles we have studied include wushu, karate, kickboxing, jiu jitsu, judo and kobudo. Personally the bulk of my experience (14 years) and what I have focused on most is kickboxing, at Champions Martial Arts academy in north vancouver. On December 1st 2009 I attained the level of black belt which I have been working towards since I was 7. Getting my black belt and building base-10 are in my opinion my 2 greatest life achievements to date and are what I am most proud about. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Martial Arts | No Comments »
