LINICKX.com

No Longer Associated with Calcylator

nick — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 15:06:00 +0000

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).

I got the "beta" site up, and pestered some non-technical friends and family to try it out; I came across a fundamental problem: ebays fees are complicated, so there's only a certain amount of simplifying you can do, general feedback was it was too much hassle... and they didn't feel the benefit, i.e. they'd much rather just pay the fees.... isn't funny how large companies can make a fortune by charging lots of people the odd pence here and there, and people would rather pay it than "waste" time finding a way not to pay it.

I'm quiet sad that this didn't work, but I'm sure there's another simpler avenue I can explore in the future, good luck to any one who decides to my old domain... well unless your one of those retailers that just buys expired domain names and then charges loads for someone genuine to use them... what I think of you couldn't be pulished ;)

My 1st AJAX...

nick — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 17:27:00 +0000

[![A simple ajax menu thing](https://www.linickx.com/files/2008/05/ajax1-150x150.png "Calcylator Ajax")](https://www.linickx.com/files/2008/05/ajax1.png)

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.

This all in mind there are area's of calcylator where the page is un-necessarily redrawn; The recently implemented new feature allows you to filter your mini-statement, the filters allow you to view only selling / sold or unsold items, now I could have implemented it traditionally or with ajax. The picture on this post highlights the new tool bar & you'll notice it is massively quick !!!!! To be honest I'm gonna stop there (for now), implementing this ajax code has totally messed up the neatness of what I have written, but I think more ajax could fit in nicely (not too much tho'), but before I put any more in I'm going to make sure the underlying code is ready for it !!!!

Calcylator - Now with added ebay !

nick — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 09:29:00 +0000

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 why are we doing this ? Well as I've previously discussed the profit and loss idea isn't working, the reason being that user's feel they are working too hard... so I'm trying to improve that, now users type in 1 number instead of 3 different pieces of information. Admittedly we're a distance away from a usable solution, but you gotta walk before you run eh ?

2006 - Year of calcylator ?

nick — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 15:12:00 +0000

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.

The site was launched in November, and at the time I thought it'd be ready for use by x-mas ebay sellers; after a couple of weeks hammering by my faithful testers I soon found the finish line was further away then I thought :( The application has 2 major hurdles to overcome:

Streamlining the user experience
Small target audience (related to fees)

Calcylator started like most applications, to solve a problem for one person, I then wanted to share it with the world. Where as the application fitted this one person, other people found they were working too hard - the same goes for the fees issue - the database fees don't allow for foreign currency or power-sellers (since I'm neither).

Moving Forward
The project todo list stands, and is very important to me (as it contains user feedback), but now I have priorities.

Quicker User Interface:
Technically there's nothing wrong with the speed, but people feel they are typing too much. To solve this we're going to aim for full ebay integration... the less you have to type the better !
Flexibility:
I'm going to add fees flexibility for non ".co.uk" and "power sellers" users can select their fee scheme. This flexibility is going to extend to the user interface - I'm going to jump on the ajax bandwagon - This part of development may be a little slow, but should be very exciting for my faithful users.

As always suggestions and feedback are welcome, and fingers crossed I'll be ready for next x-mas ;)

Calcylator Update

nick — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 09:04:00 +0000

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

Have you ever looked at how complicated ebay fees can get ? I've had a bug reported that closing fee's weren't being calculated correctly, basically I typo'd a > rather than >= and this was causing the function to fail under certain circumstances, the up-shot, closing fee's not being added to some transactions.

99p listing fees were also effected by a similar bug - DOH !

Anyway onto some good news, I shall be focusing on two new features (todo page updated), 1 improving the work flow so things feel quicker, the server and page response is excellent, but users just feel they are spending too much time typing stuff in; so I'm going to add a Sell Similar function - like what ebay do. The second will be fee variations, so shops & non-UK users can get involved !

The help section has also been updated with an link to us page so you can now share your favorite calculator with the world !
These are the graphics I've done so far, if you're a paint wizard, please let me know.

[*Images removed*](https://www.linickx.com/archives/346/no-longer-associated-with-calcylator)

Writing a PHP Page for the googlebot / google's cache

nick — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 11:37:00 +0000

Here's something cool to share.

My calcylator project is written in php, it's one of those "on-line tools" where users can create an account, log in, and can calculate personal profit & loss sheets for ebay.

Like most websites there are "log in" sections, now these pages need to be dealt with differently for search engines & users. Search engines will not be able to log in, but you may still want to deliver some content to them. Take my example, calcylator is running google adsense, and for adsense to work the googlebot (search engine) needs to be able to "see" some content, thinking this through, every time googlebot visited the log in or other protected pages all it would see is "access denied" error pages.

To target google with some "special" content, google kindly present themselves as google in their agent string. Now php even provide a simple tutorialon distinguishing user agent, so this is all I needed to do:

\ function find\_googlebot() { \# This is where we look for the googlebot \$user\_agent = \$\_SERVER["HTTP\_USER\_AGENT"]; if (preg\_match ("/[Gg][Oo][Oo][Gg][Ll][Ee]/", \$user\_agent )) { return true; } \#For debugging, uncomment this and the agent will appear in the source of the html. \#echo "\