I’ve decided to let the renewal of my domain name “calcylator.com” slip. The site was my web 2.0 idea that never got off the ground, the idea was simple, if you use ebay (as a seller) you need to calculate your costs, although ebay don’t hide fees from you the listing process doesn’t make it very obvious and if you sell a lot keeping track of your profit & loss is difficult… so I developed a site to track these and other costs (packaging etc).

My Last Calcylator post was full of hope… but now the site is closed.. what gives ?

Well our ISP had a spam issue, as part of the investigation, to protect calcylator I closed the site; development has been v.sloooooow after the last few months and I thought I’d take the time to reflect.

Calcylator isn’t a big web 2.0 application, but there are area’s where it’ll fit quite nicely with some of the new delivery methods.

AJAX is a technology that differentiates traditional websites with 2.0 ones; the basic idea is that pages are delivered to the user with less page refreshes (thus less bandwidth, in turn quicker !). A good example of a 2.0 site vs a traditional one is maps.google.co.uk vs ebay.co.uk. With ebay you’ll notice every time you update something the page refreshes & the URL changes. If you look at maps.google you’ll notice the URL never changes, in fact if you hit “refresh” on the browser any changes you made to the page disappear.

What did you do this weekend ? - Me, I made my first ebay api call - kinda geeky, and kinda cool at the same time.

You may notice that the home page on calcylator now boasts the ebay compatible logo, that’s because the SELL page on calcylator has changed. We now have the option for Quicker Entry when adding listings to the application; this quicker entry is a demonstration of where we’re going, type in your ebay listing/item id, and we’ll retrieve the item description and start price.

So It’s the new year, and I wanted to post an update about what’s happening over at calcylator.com. I guess it’s been nearly a month since there has been any visible activity, and I’d like to explain the reasons why.

I think it’s worth updating you, progress is slow, but I’m doing my best to be consistent, hopefully after the x-mas chaos, and with my health improving things will pick up again.

I’ve had a few issues with fee calculations, take a look at this:

Closing Fee over �600: (From: eBay.co.uk Fees)

5.25% of the initial �29.99 (�1.57), plus 3.25% of the initial �30.00 - �599.99 (�18.53), plus 1.75% of the remaining closing value balance

Nearly 10days in, and the bug hunt is in full swing, to be honest life is slowing me down !

I’ve learnt an important lesson it is impossible to fully bug hunt your own app, I know this seems obvious, but the scale of this truth isn’t apparent until someone else starts pulling apart what you have done.

Feedback so far:

• Many Pages: £ Signs were being formatted incorrectly - fixed
• Profit Report: Needs simple funds in & out calculation at bottom - added
• Edit sold page: Error - Cannot update postage type - removed

I’d like to introduce my new website: www.calcylator.com

Calcylator.com is personal project, targeted at ebay sellers. The site is free for people to sign up to, and provide them is a new & different profit & loss (P & L) calcylator, erm sorry, calculator

The wife & I use ebay as an on line car boot sale, one of the things we’ve noticed as sellers is how hard it is to keep track of how much you are spending on listing fees, paypal fees and P & P (postage and packaging) So in my wisdom I decided to write an application to calculate & track that information for me, and now I’m sharing it with the world !!!!