Friday, March 13, 2009

OH - Twitter

OpenHomez is now on Twitter. We post new open house listings to Twitter as they arrive within the limits imposed by Twitter (about 100 per hour). You can follow OpenHomez on Twitter here. There are a variety of Twitter widgets and gadgets here.

On 4/27/09 we added a Twitter hashtag on the open house city name and zip code to our tweets. Now you can use Twitter Search to find open house listings in a specific city or zip code. Enter a city name or zip code proceeded by a # to search for the city or zip code you are interested in. (i.e. #Sacramento or #95835).

In the very near future, we hope to be able to allow you to automatically (or manually) post your listings to your own Twitter account.

System Status

This post is used to reflect current system status and events that may effect use of the system. Hopefully we don't have to use it very often. New events and information will be entered at that top of this post. All times are Pacific Time.

** 3/13/2009 07:00 - Operating normally.

** 3/13/2009 07:00 - We sincerely apologize for the system outage yesterday. We are taking steps to move our backups to an off site facility so we can minimize the chances of our production and backup data being lost in the same event.

** 3/13/2009 07:00 - All syndication and notification feeds have been restored.

** 3/12/2009 17:00 - Most of the "active listings" data has been recovered. However, due to the damage to the user database, most of the listings are not associated with an individual user. If we were processing a feed that you were supplying to us that feed process, the data, and your userid have been restored.

** 3/12/2009 15:00 - The system is back up and running with limited data. We lost all of the listing data and most of the User data base. If you had an ID on OpenHomez.com in the past you should try to log in. We apologize but you may need to recreate your userid.

** 3/12/2009 13:00 - The data base storage facility has been replaced as well as the Web server. We are in the process of rebuilding the system and the data bases.

** 3/12/2009 07:00 - We experienced a catastrophic failure of our servers. Not only did we loose our primary data base but the backups were also damaged. We are working on recovering the system now.

Monday, March 9, 2009

Features List

Over the past years we have added many new features to OpenHomez.com. Rather than have you scan through this entire blog we thought we would create a consolidated features list. Each feature is linked back to the blog entry that describes the feature in detail. Another good source of summary information is our FAQ page

Current features of OpenHomez.com include:

Free syndication of your open house listings
Broad Internet Syndication
Send us your open house data for syndication
Email and SMS notifications
RSS feed of YOUR open houses
Download To A Calendar
Download To A GPS
Download GPS/Map Data
iGoogle Gadget with up to 5 zip codes
Google Base Syndication
Google Earth
OpenHomez on Twitter
Notify.me Of Search Updates
OpenHomez on Tumblr
Tweet to your personal Twitter account

All of this for FREE. Our service is completely ad and donation supported.

Searching for open houses does not require a login or sign up. Neither does the use of the RSS, download, and gadget features above. We only ask for ID and email address if the email or SMS notification options are chosen. All links come back to listing agent's site. We do not sell or distribute any information collected on our site. We do not SPAM.

Come back to this page often as new features will be posted here.