Thanks for all your help! I've been speaking with a friend of mine who's a real estate agent. He's mentioned about IDX listings - would you happen to know how it works and whether or not, I can just fetch API data? It seems like some companies provide it as a full embeddable solution which looks horrible for my purposes.
Would you also be able to elaborate more on using akismet for lead generator? Did you mean that spammers would hit the contact form fairly often?
Thanks for your help. And I understand about not stepping on your previous employers' toes. If there are any questions I'm asking that you do not feel comfortable with, please let me know.
No worries. IDX Information you get from the MLS directly. They are very strict about their feeds, so you'll have to talk to them about their terms and conditions and how they allow you to access their information. The RETS[1] feed is slowly becoming the standard, but again, it varies.
To start, I'd just have it simply be a form the agent can fill out. I think Zillow might have an API, but you'll just have to put on the site that the data is from Zillow. A small price to pay for a huge convenience for the agent.
I used Akismet to weed out spam posts. I didn't want to implement a captcha, I set up a javascript honeypot as the first defense but Akismet was the second defense. It was great, because it allowed for "Mark as spam" "This is not spam" options that you can contribute back to the Akismet engine to make it smarter, and it took about an hour to implement in PHP...super easy and a great selling point.
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Thanks for all your help! I've been speaking with a friend of mine who's a real estate agent. He's mentioned about IDX listings - would you happen to know how it works and whether or not, I can just fetch API data? It seems like some companies provide it as a full embeddable solution which looks horrible for my purposes.
Would you also be able to elaborate more on using akismet for lead generator? Did you mean that spammers would hit the contact form fairly often?
Thanks for your help. And I understand about not stepping on your previous employers' toes. If there are any questions I'm asking that you do not feel comfortable with, please let me know.
No worries. IDX Information you get from the MLS directly. They are very strict about their feeds, so you'll have to talk to them about their terms and conditions and how they allow you to access their information. The RETS[1] feed is slowly becoming the standard, but again, it varies.
To start, I'd just have it simply be a form the agent can fill out. I think Zillow might have an API, but you'll just have to put on the site that the data is from Zillow. A small price to pay for a huge convenience for the agent.
I used Akismet to weed out spam posts. I didn't want to implement a captcha, I set up a javascript honeypot as the first defense but Akismet was the second defense. It was great, because it allowed for "Mark as spam" "This is not spam" options that you can contribute back to the Akismet engine to make it smarter, and it took about an hour to implement in PHP...super easy and a great selling point.
[1]: http://www.rets.org/ (Looks like their website is down)