Dwellicious developers page

Dwellicious chiclets

When added to a page with a real estate listing, a Dwellicious chiclet link makes it easy for consumers and real estate professionals to bookmark the listing on Dwellicious.com with a simple click. The chiclet consists of a simple graphic in PNG format, along with a properly formatted href link. Clicking the link starts the process of creating the bookmark by opening a new browser window with a pre-filled form. The values pre-filled in the form come from the parameters defined in the javascript link.

The implementer of the chiclet must take care to properly fill in three simple parameters:

1. desc - The page description or title. This will become the default 'Title' for the bookmark. Typically, you would just use the document.title.
2. uri - The URI for this listing. This will become the 'Url' for the bookmark and allow the user to get back to this listing for more details. Typically, you would just use the location.href, but you may want to use any short, unique url that is guaranteed to lead back to this listing detail page.
3. src - The source for this listing. This will be used only for internal logging, to track that this bookmark was created by a chiclet on the source site. Just use a single word that describes your site.

Note: If you have any ampersands in your url query params, you MUST escape them or your query params will be truncated. Our 'Add to Dwellicious' browser bookmarklet does this using the javascript 'escape' function (example: "alert(escape(location.href));"). Use that - or a similar function from your native language - to be thorough. When you test your chiclet, just make sure nothing is getting cut off the end of the url that is passed.

Sample chiclets

• 16x16 logo with label - this is the suggested chiclet:
  
  
  
  
• 32x32 logo with no label:
  
  
  
  
• 16x16 logo with text:
  
  Dwellicious

HTML Code

Use View Source to see the code for all three chiclets.

Here's what the top one looks like:

Dwellicious data JSON array

Dwellicious relies on a combination of CSS selectors, HTML dom selectors, and regular expressions to identify data to be indexed on a detailed listing page. When sites update the look of their pages, these selectors can change. When they change significantly, we can have a hard time updating our indexes. We do have alarms and procedures to notify us of these events, but indexing can be disabled for days at a time.

There is a relatively simple, straightforward way to ensure that indexed data in Dwellicious is always accurate and timely. It involves placing a simple JSON array containing all the important property details inside a CDATA section of each listing detail page. This information is not visible to the end user, but is available to be easily indexed by Dwellicious.

Sample JSON array

Notes:

1. Ensure that the price and beds are integers - remove dollar signs, commas, etc.
2. Baths can be integer or decimal.

Debugger

After applying a JSON array to a publicly accessible page, you can test and debug that page by going to http://dwellicious.com/indexer, inputting the url, and clicking the 'Index' button. It typically takes 2-5 seconds to index a page.

If the JSON array is found and the listing data is properly read, you will see a table containing the data followed by any images found. This is a positive result and this page is ready to be bookmarked and indexed in Dwellicious immediately. The next step would be to try bookmarking the page exactly the way a consumer would.

If there are any problems finding or reading the array, then once the page is loaded it will remain blank and no table or photos will be displayed. This is a negative result, indicating the JSON array in the page found at that url needs further refinement.

Questions?

E-mail questions to dan at dwellicious dot com