Categories
Marketing tech

A Digital Signage Project

I have been working with Timothy Toye, a realtor, for a long time. Originally I was able to buy some software that would display Lake County properties for sale by pulling from the California MLS system. However, over time, the software didn’t keep up with California standards so I decided to build a real estate project by myself. (I could have paid $$ to get a custom version, but that seemed like too much per month.)

I started with using a Lamp stack on the backend with a Laravel library for accessing the MLS data. Then I used a lot of small php routines and bash scripts to create all the materials to create a website carousel property display.

Finally, I mounted a raspberry pi to the back of a large monitor, and put that in the realtor’s front office. I set the pi software to boot up into a chrome browser that points at the website. Everyday a script runs to update the website.

It’s surprising how much work goes into creating a product that seems simple on the surface. Such is programming!

Categories
Marketing tech

Web Analytics: First Steps

Step 1: Find the best rated “Google Analytics” book on Amazon Search

OK, I found a couple books: Web Analytics 2.0, and Web Analytics: An Hour A Day, both by Avinash Kaushik.  Looking good, but really old in internet years. I remember making a point to study the first book a long time ago…

Step 2: Google him!
I found a few interesting things: 1) his website is called Occam’s Razor. It formed the basis for his books, so I should be able to get a lot of info from them.

Next I found: “5 Avinash Kaushik blogs every digital marketer should read” in google search. Why not?! I’m getting distracted.

In signing up for Avinash’s newsletter, he refers me to an article featuring an icon of the design industry: Dieter Rams: Ten Principles of “Good Design”, one can’t go wrong studying Dieter!

So, time to do the “hour a day” in reading up on this. (Only problem, I’m already overbooked!)