I hope everyone had a great Labor Day long weekend. I just returned from a visit to my hometown of Vancouver, Canada – a beautiful city where real estate discussion is not just a pastime but a full contact sport.

Catching up on my newsreader and email, despite a last long weekend, it was anything but quiet in the real estate blogosphere…

Probaly the biggest news was that the Rain City Guide was hacked. Kudos go to Dustin who must have worked his tail off to get the site up and running again (I’m sure that’s just what he wanted to be doing on a sunny long weekend) and he gives us 10 Great Reasons NOT to use WordPress… in response.

This experience certainly should give any blogger pause for thought. But it’s not enough to move me off WP. I’ve run my personal blog on a number of alternative Content Management Systems (CMS) in the past, including both Mambo and Joomla and while they are all great products, they are really not setup as a great blogging platform. And, in my experience, Mambo was even more prone to security problems. Wordpress, despite its flaws, is still the blogging leader. That said, I will be reviewing my site’s security settings to prevent a similar situation developing here.

Before RCG went down however, Robbie gave us a great post “I am Tiger Woodsâ€? – which provided a good developer’s view of the Real Estate 2.0 playing field. His Zearch tool, which you can find on the RCG, is one of the more innovative, if a little unpolished, real estate search tools out there – so it was nice to hear his perspective on where things stand.

Of course the other big news from over the weekend was the NY Times piece on Redfin (Does anybody have a link to the complete story? The NY Times site has gone subscriber only). Greg Sterling weighed in with his thoughts and even heavyweight blogger Jeff Jarvis chimed in on the subject. Verbal fisticuffs flew over the piece, prompting some great discussion, with Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman himself even jumping into the fray.

A couple more posts that caught my eye too:

• sellsius blog’s 10 Ways To Keep Your Blog Posts Out of Limbo summed up a lot of good ideas, as I’ve been giving this problem a lot of thought recently. My solution was to use the WP plugin ‘The Feature‘ to highlight particularly noteworthy posts. You can see those posts on the right column under Featured Posts.
• The Phoenix Real Estate Guy also gives us a great picture of a New Marketing Strategy…

Finally, The Carnival of Real Estate is now up at Nubricks.com – so I’ll have a ton more reading to catch up on there.

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Dustin Luther over Rain City Guide has posted the replies to a series of community-generated questions asked about Yahoo! Real Estate.

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