Hey Gang!
Welcome to your new home. After a year of blogging, it was about time for an upgrade and oil change. And while the blog might not look very different from the outside, the engine is completely rebuilt and filled with gas!
We have a bunch of exciting new changes rolling out within the next couple months for the blog but first let’s look at a couple of important changes that have already happened.
1. First and foremost, how you write your articles for the internal blog and external blog has changed slightly… At the very top of your screen you will now see a drop down menu with two choices.
A. EWM Realtors, this is the external facing blog. When you are writing an article that you want published on the external blog, you need to make sure that EWM Realtors is displayed at the top of the screen.
B. Internal Blog, this is the internal blog. When you are writing an article that you would like published on the internal blog, then you need to make sure that Internal Blog is what is showing on the top.
You can very easily jump back and forth between to the two blogs by simply holding your mouse over the menu and selecting which blog you would like to write for. Why the change? Well by splitting up the internal blog and external blog, it allows us to do some very cool things. Right now you are actually blogging within a much bigger community than just EWM. Let’s say at some point in the future, several of you join different social blogging networks like a Women Counsel of Realtors, or a GRI blog. You would not have to have two separate logins but rather just use the drop down menu at the top to switch between blogs. Or let’s say we have an API that would join this blog with Active Rain… So you log in to ewmrealtors.com and can blog straight on to Active Rain… We also now have much better email alerts and rss feeds set up for the internal blog that were lacking on the other site.
2. Speed. We are now super cached. While at first it might not look like much of a difference to you, visitors coming from the search engines will see the site load about 5 to 10 times faster than it used to. The reason is that we are storing HTML versions of common database queries so the site doesn’t have to grab information from the database everytime a page loads. Why will it not seem that much faster to you? Well it won’t always grab the HTML version of the site when you are actively logged in to the site and actively commenting on the site. If you saw the HTML version of the page, you would never see any new comments that you left. So it should still be a bit faster for you guys, simply because we have dramatically reduced the amount of database queries, the real speed will be seen by the consumer.
3. Scalability. The engine of this blog is built on the WordPress platform. WordPress releases new versions and updates to their blogging platform about once a quarter. When this blog was first set up a year ago, it was so customized that it became hard to upgrade the blog on a regular basis. This was a very important aspect that needed to be changed. The site is now very scalable and you will continue to see new changes and developments every couple months keeping the software up to date and very much competitive. We will actually be running another update within the next month to catch up with the latest release and continue to stay relevant. So over the past year, you guys haven’t seen any new features or gizmos. Now we will have regular upgrades about once a quarter.
There are many other changes also in the works like more customized Agent pages within the blog, video tutorials scattered throughout the backend, lively forums to participate in, blogging chat rooms, and much more.
So until then, BLOG AWAY!!!!
Tomato Gang.