Displet

In our continuing effort to support the WordPress community, the open source community, and our clients, DispletSearch 1.0 Beta was recently submitted to and accepted by the WordPress Repository. DispletSearch is a fantastic plugin that allows Displet subscribers to easily create quick searches in the sidebar, or more advanced searches in a page. Though still in beta, DispletSearch is extremely stable and feature rich. We’d love to hear feedback from our users, so please contact us at any time!

Get ready for a nerdy post!

We have now upgraded our code base & framework to Ruby 1.9.2 and Rails 3.0.3, respectively. This is a fairly large “behind the scenes” improvement and will result in some pretty nice gains on a couple of fronts. First, we should see a reduction in page load time as Rails 3 and Ruby 1.9 are considerably faster. Second, we’ve greatly expanded our cucumber test suite to help us manage bugs. Testing is a great concept heavily utilized in agile development projects (we’re an agile shop.) Code testing slows down code development slightly, but speeds up the project overall. Any time we fix a bug, we write a test for that bug. When we develop new code, we run our suite of tests to ensure that no past bugs have resurfaced. So, in theory, when we fix a bug, it’s the last time our end users will ever see it.

We’re pretty excited that these upgrades are rolled out. We have a backlog of bug fixes & features that have yet to be deployed. Now that this upgrade is deployed, our users will enjoy a short period of extremely rapid development followed by an even stabler system.

We just rolled out another set of bugfixes & enhancements. We received quite a bit of feedback that our thumbnail image resolution was too low. While this helped the images load quickly, they looked a little fuzzy. We’ve now doubled the size of all thumbnail images on import so you’ll see all new thumbnail images coming in with much better resolution.

For those that require registration after a certain number of property detail views, we’ve removed the X out from the login/registration page. In the past, the X was visible, but disabled. We’ve now removed it so there’s no confusion – visitors do not have the option to close the box. Hopefully this will result in a better conversion rate for that light window.

We modified the keyword search field to query more fields. In addition to agent remarks & subdivision, keyword also now queries mls_number, street_name,
street_address, zip, property_type, & view. This will allow third party developers to create some cool quick searches & is also more intuitive for the end user.

Beyond these visible fixes, we had a number of “under the hood” fixes that aren’t readily apparent, but which keep the application lean and mean.

We recently upgraded our server to a larger Amazon EC2 instance for the Displet core app. It was a fairly sizable upgrade and we saw a very nice reduction in page load time. Overall, our page load time was improved by 66.5% (a decrease in load time by 66.5%.) for our top five requests.  Here are numbers on commonly loaded pages.

We just rolled out an awesome new feature “SEO Friendly URLs.”  Since it’s so important to rank for individual property addresses, and Google takes into account the URL of every page, we thought it would be killer to add the property address to each detail page’s URL.  So…we added the property address to each property detail page’s URL.  If you’re a Displet Pro subscriber, this was added to your account free of charge.  Don’t worry about duplicate content issues – all of the old URLs send a 301 redirect to the new, prettier URLs.

Displet is proud to announce that we now service the New Orleans market and NOMAR board of Realtors.  New Orleans is a fantastic city with fantastic agents, and we look forward to expensing meals on Bourbon Street!

We’re proud to unveil a new custom site we built for Sharon Seligman, in Austin.  Sharon works in Central Austin & Spicewood, and specializes in Green Construction.  As such, it was important to her to show both modern & green elements.  Sharon takes advantage of Displet Custom RETS, so has hosted property detail pages, a killer map search, quick search, & featured listings modules.  She’s already started building out her neighborhood pages using DispletReader.  We think the design came out great!

We’re in the process of increasing our resources and diversifying to Amazon’s suite of Cloud products.  Yesterday, we rolled out a system change so that we’re now storing all images on Amazon S3.  As a result, the images are in the process of uploading, so many properties do not have thumbnail images.  As is always the case, when a user clicks through to the property detail page, the images will load automatically with Ajax.  We’re sorry for the inconvenience, but feel that the additional resources will pay off very nicely in the long run.

We’re proud to finally unveil the new Displet.com!  Displet.com is a custom WordPress theme created with a number of plugins (that we’ve written, and that we’re happily borrowing.)  Check it out and let us know what you think!