What you are seeing is what is called the front-end of a website. You’re seeing the header with the title Philippine Real Estate and Construction with a collage of pictures beside it and the Condominium Directory to the right. On top of it is the Navigation Bar. You also see the left and right side bars and of course the blog contents.

What you don’t see and something that only I am privy to is the back-end where the real action takes place. It’s where the bells and whistles are. That’s where I write this post and those before it. The back-end is also where some codings are done so you can see what you are seeing now. Posts are written in what’s called a blog editor; see the image below and click to enlarge.

See the word near the upper leftmost portion, the one that is bolded? It says Dashboard because the blog editor functions exactly like a car’s dashboard.

After a post is written, I have the option to either save it as a Draft (for publication at a later time) or to immediately publish it. The night I wrote my last post, I saved it as a Draft for proofreading. Right after I clicked the “Save Draft” button (the one on the upper right just below the word “Publish,” all the contents of my post including images disappeared. I had no choice but to do it all over again.

Good thing is I first write all my posts in Notepad then copy/paste the contents to this blog editor. It was tedious nonetheless as I had to upload all the images all over again. After I was done, I clicked the Save Draft button again and all the contents disappeared again, for the second time.
The third time, I chose not to save it but published it immediately by clicking the Publish button (the one with white font and blue background).

And the post went live.

The following day, I tried to “Update” an old post – Trip to Georgia Club in Sta. Rosa, Laguna – that I published on November 2010. After I made some changes and clicked the Update button, all the contents disappeared in the blog editor. When I previewed it, the post was blank except for the titles. See the images below.

Here’s the post as it actually looks now.

It was a complete disaster as I have lost this post and there is no way to recover it.

I asked for help in Facebook from peers who do the same thing that I do – online marketing of real estate. There are at least two groups in Facebook whose members help one another on matters like this: WordPress for Real Estate Agents and Tech Support Group for Real Estate Agents.

Members from both groups are unanimous in saying that my website woes are most probably caused by my “Plugins.”

images of plugins of Philippine Real Estate and Construction

Plugins are the bells and whistles that allow website users and developers to extend the abilities and functionality of a site beyond the features of a basic web install.

If you go back to the first image, you will see “Plugins” in the middle of the left side bar. When I click it, it shows the plugins that I have installed in my website.

To see if indeed a plugin or two are causing the magic disappearance of the contents of my blog whenever I edit and save them, I will have to disable or deactivate them all. On the front-end, you will not be able to get in touch with me using the “Contact Us” form in the navigation bar. You will have to do so via junsanchez2003(at)yahoo.com.

If the problem disappears after I disable all the plugins, then, it is indeed a plugin issue. The next step is to find out which plugin is causing the problem. I will then have to activate the plugins one at a time.

This post will be the laboratory to find out the culprit plugin. If this post suddenly disappears, it means I have activated the malicious plugin.

So brace yourselves as I might do something that will make not just this post but the entire website disappear. That’s something that will make me cry. Seriously, you might see things suddenly change, move or look funny as you read this; that means I am working in the background.

Until then, enjoy this blog until it is swallowed by the big black hole in the blogosphere.

Wish me luck and thank you so much.

Jun Sanchez
Licensed Real Estate Broker
PRC Registration 4562
Tel 857.0100 local 1391
Globe 0915.965.1389
Smart 0929.609.7142
Sun 0932.912.9585

“No one has ever become poor by giving.” by Anne Frank

This is to announce that I am relinquishing my copyright on all the contents of this website. Put in another way, I shall not claim any intellectual property right on all my posts, images, or any element that you may find useful in this site; you are free to copy them and even claim them as your own.

This website could not have been made possible without the help of so many people. Foremost is Ms. Celine Roque a.k.a. Frugal Pinoy who readily, patiently and without hesitation shared everything I needed to learn without expecting anything in return.

The others are:

• EdZee of Owning an I-Cafe
• James of PinoyMoneyTalk
• Tyrone of Millionaire Acts
• YellowMinded who up to now chooses to remain a mystery
• Andy Adan, my great buddy, of Graphitect, Inc
• My friend of more than twenty years, Atty. Noel Jocson and her beloved wife, Mrs. Liza Jocson, who gave me a great tour of Sta. Rosa and Silang, Cavite last October 1
• Mrs. Nelly C. Gomez, Sta. Rosa City’s Assessor and so many more

I know I can never pay them back, so I’ll pay it forward.

The first three guys on the list, by the way, are finalists in the 2009 Philippine Blog Awards; Business Category. They don’t know it, but I constantly lurk in their blogs and try to emulate their style and the overall look and feel of their sites. I only follow the best.

My research on copyright laws led me to Creative Commons (CC) – a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. This organization works to counter what its founder, Lawrence Lessig, describes as

an increasingly restrictive Permission Culture; a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of the creators of the past.

With this in mind, I am using Creatrive Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported. I am granting anyone full permission to use any of my own original contents in any way you like which means:

You are free:

to Share – to copy, distribute and transmit my own content whether for commercial or non-commercial use

to Remix – to adapt, alter, transform or build upon my own content

Under the following conditions:

Attribution: Ideally, I would welcome that you credit me for my content and a link back to the original will be greatly appreciated. But you are under no legal obligation to do so. And if you do so, make sure that no suggestion or insinuation shall be made that I endorse you or your work that built upon my content.

Share Alike (Optional): If you alter, transform, or build upon my content, you may distribute the resulting work under the same, similar or compatible license to this one, if you like.

Content refers to all my original written articles or blogs, images and everything else that you see in it. You can even make a mirror copy of my blog for all you like.

Important: This so-called “open source copyright” applies only to my own content. It does not in anyway apply to the websites or articles to which I have linked to; you are duty-bound to respect their  copyright.

Neither shall it apply to the guest-written article that was just featured in this website and to future ones. The authors of such articles shall keep exclusive rights and ownership of their articles but grant this website the right to edit and publish said articles royalty-free. Edited articles shall be for the approval of the original author prior to publication. The authors are free to submit the same exact articles to other websites or publications, preferably, but not necessarily, with prior notice to this website.

My take on copyright laws

Some of you may be wondering why I’m offering such an open-door policy on my work.

First, I’m not a big fan of copyright laws in the internet. This is not to say that I will not respect the copyright license of other creators; I shall and always will. My open source copyright policy only applies to those who want to use the contents of this website but not to me when I visit other websites and research their contents.

I always do my best to make my contents as useful and as informative as possible. But for all intents and purposes, these contents may turn out to be nothing more than a collection of baloney and crap to you. So why impose restrictive copyright on something whose usefulness I can never guarantee? (kindly read my Disclaimer) However, in the event that you find some of them useful, that alone is reward in itself.

If you look at all creative works, not just in the internet, but also in the physical world, many are not really original. They are a mere collection, mutation or permutation of information that have already long existed, what Lawrence Lessig  calls creations derived from creators of the past.

The internet has been very good to us; it has given us access to vast amount of information freely in ways we never imagined were possible. So, who am I to do the opposite?

If you think my idea of an open source copyright is new, you are very much mistaken. I ripped it off from someone who encourages others to rip off his contents. His name is Leo Babauta of Zen Habits, rated by Time Magazine as number nine among the 25 best blogs in the world for 2009. He calls his Open Source Blogging.

This guy completely blew me away!

This open source copyright license is not a stunt that simply followed Leo’s lead just for its shock value or to create buzz. I truly believe in the original promise of the Internet:

…to enable people to imagine, innovate and create upon the resources available therein

Sadly, as Lessig puts it: “this is the environment that cultural monopolists, mostly media giants, try to undermine in order to maintain their profit.”

Thanks a lot

One standard feature of this blog and most other blogs is the comment section where readers are encouraged to post comments on each entry. I personally welcome whatever comment my readers may throw at me, whether positive or negative, as long as they’re constructive and honest. I also welcome those from fellow bloggers whose comments create  links to their own websites or blogs; it’s a common practice among bloggers as a way for us to help generate traffic to one another’s sites.

What I don’t welcome are spam comments, which I receive scores of. These comments are created not by people but by what we call robots, spiders or web crawlers. These are programs used by bloggers to propagate their websites across thousands, even hundreds of thousands of websites in the internet with the click of a button.

Did you know that you may comment as many times as you like but none of them may ever appear? It’s because web admins like me have the final say on whether we want to publish your comments or not. We get first dibs on your comments. We may even edit your comments and spin them around if we like (I swear, I’ll never do that).

But let’s get on to the meat of the matter – What is Gravatar?

This image  used to be the default avatar of all commenters, including myself, in this site; it’s called the mystery man avatar and looks like a shooting target, it’s ugly: ( So far, only one visitor who’s a professional blogger himself, has figured out the beauty and importance of having a gravatar.

“Gravatar is short for Globally recognized avatar… or icon, or representation of you and follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things on any blog, web forum or website.”

Created by Tom Werner , a gravatar makes it possible for a person to have one avatar across the entire web,” including Facebook. That’s unless you modify your profile settings in each website, social media network or forum that you have ever been to or will become a member of.

Isn’t that cool?

Warning to forum “tambays” who enjoy trolling or flaming – your identities will be revealed.

I just signed up at Gravatar and uploaded an image (not my picture; if you want to see how ugly I am, check out the bottom part of my About page) to promote the use of Gravatar. So now, all others who commented have the Gravatar logo as their default avatar.

Change it by grabbing your own globally recognized avatar at gravatar.com and establish a personalized online presence in the world wide web and let’s all cease looking like shooting targets in every forum and website that we frequent.

Thanks a lot

References: WordPress.org, Gravatar.com