Hank Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury, and George Bush are asking Congress for the authority to spend up to $700 billion at a time (that’s a balance sheet maximum, not a maximum on the total the government can spend).  That’s more than the total cost of the War in Iraq so far.  The Treasury will spend it buying bad loans, and get no equity stake in the firms they’re buying them from — leading some to call it “cash for trash”.

Section eight of the proposed legislation gives Paulson an oversight-free blank check as to how to spend that much of your money.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

You can read the full text here.

Although as you might expect, public opposition to the plan is strongest among Democrats, several prominent conservatives have also gone on record as being opposed to the plan.  This legislation is so bad that even CNN gets it.

Please look up and either write to or phone your Senator and House Representative right away.  You can learn more about the proposal by clicking through on the articles current on Digg for Business and Finance.

Congress is in a HUGE RUSH to get this done, so those of us who think it’s expensive, ill conceived and leaves us stuck holding the bill need to MOVE NOW to express our concerns to Congress.

UPDATE:

Here is the latest draft the bill, which I must admit I think is substantially better than Paulson’s original proposal.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say this makes me for the bill, but at least it’s moving in the right direction.

Anecdotally, then, my directly blog-related conversion rate went up maybe 1700% or so.

What changed to make this happen?  Well, one of the recent things I did was to completely get rid of comments on my blog.

Conversion, Not Conversation

When I got rid of comments, I wasn’t expecting to increase my conversion rate from the blog.  I wasn’t expecting to decrease it, either.  I didn’t really expect it to change at all.  I got rid of comments because I was sick of having to open up the comments page only to find yet another anti-Realtor troll trying to get me worked up.

I do have an idea about why I’m getting more contacts from my blog now that users are forced to use my contact page instead of a comment form, however. 

I think that not having comments on the blog helps to sends a message — albeit on a very subtle level — that I’m blogging to make contact with customers, not to socialize.

Maybe to the extent that you’re goofing off on your blog / Facebook /  Twitter / Myspace, you look like you’re goofing off on your blog / Facebook / Twitter / Myspace.

But John, You Can’t Get Rid Of Comments!

Of course I can.  Web 2.0 is a great buzzword, but I’ve spent enough time as a software developer to be comfortable with my geek credentials.  Because of this, my goal is to have a successful online business, not to be more buzzword compliant by bandying  ersatz version numbers. 

Besides, if your real estate clients really wanted a nerd and not a Realtor®, more real estate agents would market themselves at Star Trek conventions.

Don’t forget your Vulcan ears.

I’m not saying you should get rid of comments if they’re really working for you, but for those who think they are, have you experimented with not having them?

From my point of view, I’m spending hundreds of hours every year blogging to help me reach customers, not to have a conversation (if you can call it that) with these losers.  You wouldn’t let a drunken, semi-literate moron ruin your open house or get in your face in your office.  Why should you put up with them on a web site to which you’ve equally dedicated time and money?

Similarly, when a buyer visits your open house, do you put your feet on the coffee table and say, “Come on in and have a House 2.0 Konversation, dood!”, or do you try to conduct yourself as a professional with whom your visitor might want to do business?

Of course, you should have your phone number on every page of the site, and you should have a contact form equally prominently available.  You’re not trying to hide from legitimate customers.  If my experience is any guide, your clients will begin to appreciate that you’re not just hanging around the Office Water Cooler 2.0, and respond accordingly.  You may even find yourself making more money 1.0.

How To Get Rid of Comments on Wordpress

As always, before you make any changes you’ll want to back up your existing files.  Also if you’re not comfortable coding, don’t follow these steps.  If you are it should take you fifteen minutes or less.

The way I went about this was to first create a brain dead function in my theme’s directory’s function.php file:

<?php

// ...

function show_comments()
{
    return false;
}?>

The reason for this is simply to make it easier to change my mind later by returning true, if indeed I change my mind later.  You may not have a functions.php file, but if not, show_comments() is a good reason to create one — again, it goes in your theme directory.

Next, I wrapped the call to comments_popup_link in index.php, changing the line

<div>comments_popup_link(...whatever)...</div>

to

if (show_comments())
{
    <div>comments_popup_link(...whatever)...</div>
}

If you’re OK with not showing comments that you already have, you can also go after single.php and change the call to comments_template to read:

if (show_comments())
{
    comments_template();
}

Keeping the comments you have already means you would need to go into comments.php and leave the part that displays the comments while removing the comment submission form (or better yet, wrapping the form in a show_comments conditional, as above).

Once you’ve done these steps, if you have no other references to comments-post.php in your themes you can go into your Wordpress root directory and rename comments-post.php to something like comments-post.my_secret_backup.  This will ensure that you’re now not only free from trolls with keyboards, you’re also more secure from spambots (which suck up server time sending you spam about little blue pills and the like).

Finally, if you’re sick of trackback spam, too, while you’re in the Wordpress root go ahead and rename wp-trackback.php to something like wp-trackback.I_hate_trackback_spam.

I really must get with him on that to get him over here to talk about his experience implementing what I think is one of the coolest local interest blogs I’ve seen.  You see, what Aaron has done is to get a group of local businesses together to create a sort of ultimate closing gift from the donations of this local business community, which he promotes heavily on his blog.  The result I think is a very successful combination of:

• A business referral network.
• A high value promotion for his own business.
• An excellent community resource for home shoppers and others interested in his area.

Variations on a Theme

I’ve been wanting to create either a Business Forum for Sacramento or a more general portal for some time now, and seeing what Aaron did ramped up my interest in that goal.  Rather than add it to my existing Sacramento real estate site, however, I decided to go in a slightly different direction. 

At first I looked at some of the forums and city guides of various kinds that are already out there in Sacramento.  Many of the domain names I wanted were already taken, by web sites in various stages of growth and activity, so I finally decided on a slice of the Internet pie that I thought large enough geographically (Greater Sacramento) but narrow enough topically (Businesses).  Part of the reason for this business emphasis is that the goal of the site is to network not only for the sake of my real estate business, but also to help spread the word about my web site development business and do some more local business in that area.

On the issue of “What the heck will it run on?” I looked at several alternatives.  PhpBB is a very popular forum software, but any kind of wider support for blogging or content management is ad hoc at best.  vBulletin comes with good credentials and an optional blogging module, but it’s not free, and given that I don’t always know how successful these projects will be and I’m the guy funding it with, I tend to like free (yes, I know, the money is trivial compared to the time spent, but there it is).

What the Heck is a Drupal?

What I finally settled on was Drupal, a general purpose, open source content management system.  Drupal has the best built in integration for a web site with forums and a blog (or a blog per user, but I’m not sure I’m going there yet).  It does a lot of things including user registration and the forums and putting content where you want it reasonably well.  The theme interface is very clean compared to Wordpress, and it’s reasonable to do a custom theme in about three files total.

Of course, compared to Wordpress, any blogging platform is bound to look somewhat primitive.  Setting up a Drupal 6 blog to use Live Writer to post takes a little more work, but it’s pretty much detailed here.

In any event, the result has just launched and is in a very early stage, but it’s running and looks somewhat credible:  SacramentoBusinessForum.com. 

As always, however, the real community web site devil is in this detail:

Just add users!

Fortunately I didn’t lose any data, but it was still an almost two-day pain in the butt to get back to an unhacked state.  After seeing what became of many of my files and database entries, I was a bit amazed that Wordpress is as insecure as it is.

Several articles go into the sorts of hacks I was dealing with, where PHP code disguised as image files are added to the list of active plugins.  Yuck.

Probably the most helpful article was Did Your Site Get Hacked.  Why, yes it did.  You might also consult Wordpress Security Notes.

If you simply must see the glass as half full, one of the good things that came out of this was that I have now hardened both my own blogs and those of the clients who are hosted with my blog on my server, and at the same time in order to make maintenance less of a nightmare I’ve consolidated several just-sitting-there blogs into my more popular blogs.

Oh well, into each life must fall not just rain, but two days of useless software development aimed at thwarting some malicious moron with a copied exploit script.

The discussion is fabulously short, really, and my experience boils down to having too high an expectation for what would happen.  The premise of the site was that the community of real estate authors would visit the site and vote on their favorite content, and those votes would be the basis of the award.

As it unfolded, however, very few people were interested in reading or promoting content that wasn’t their own.  A few folks did, and I’m grateful to those who did.  But the vast majority of users were only interested in promoting their own content.  That’s fine, such as it is.  It’s certainly one of the reasons Digg based sites are so popular.  But as it turned out, there weren’t enough people interested in anyone else’s content to sustain a user-voted award by any reasonable definition.

I’m not saying that such a thing won’t miraculously start to happen, and if it does, we can get the award ball rolling again.  But I don’t expect it to.

Maybe you’re mad at NAR and you don’t care if you add the trademark symbol or not, but for most of us, we don’t mind (and consider it a lower risk proposition) to go ahead and put the trademark on there. Realtor®, as you may know, is a registered trademark of the National Association of Realtors®.

The trouble for bloggers is that many bloggers don’t know how to type the trademark symbol, and even for those that do, typing that stupid “®” every time is a pain in the neck. But don’t worry, the plugin makes it simple. Install it, then go ahead and type the r-word (in either lower case or upper case), and the plugin will automatically correct your usage.

Installation: Just download the plugin, unzip it into your Wordpress plugin directory, activate it on the Manage Plugins page, and you’re good to go! No warranty is provided, including fitness for use. Enjoy!

Current Release

The 1.4 Release (final?) leaves hyphenated forms (realtor-whatever or whatever-realtor) alone. This is important as we found out because Wordpress permalinks frequently use hyphens, and people couldn’t link to this post. Now a link to this post will work!

Version 1.3 added the Realtor® Fix Plugin Test Page, which you can visit to see how the plugin will transform your posts. Because it’s pretty well tested, the plugin offers a simple switch (see the plugin code) for enabling comment filtering if you want. However, it still ships with comment filtering disabled by default. This version offers improved matching code, so most URLs with some version of “Realtor®” in them should work well without using the “[sic]” to disable adding the trademark. However, adding the “[sic]” is still supported. Finally, this version also offers support for capitalizing the REALTOR® trademark. Simply type it in all caps (REALTOR®) and it will do the right thing. If you capitalize the first letter or don’t capitalize anything, you’ll get “Realtor®”.

The 1.2 Release added two features: First, if you add “[sic]” after the r-word it will suppress adding the trademark (but remove the “[sic]“). Thus, if you need to link to realtor.com, use http://www.realtor.com. Secondly, comments are not processed. A few minutes after I had the plugin installed a user used the r-word in a url, and it was transformed. Users commenting shouldn’t have to know the rules of use.