Since releasing my web-based 2009 eBay Fee Calculator a few weeks ago I thought it would be a good idea to make a list of every other eBay fee calculator I could find just to see what else is out there and to show people all of their available options. Next to each calculator, I've also noted down who wrote it, when it was last updated, and which sections of eBay it supports. To make it easier to find calculators with up-to-date fee rates, I've also sorted them by date with the most recently updated ones at the top. If you know of an eBay fee calculator that's not on this list, leave a comment on this page and I'll add it.

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After redesigning my PayPal Fee Calculator a few weeks ago I thought it would be a good idea to make a list of all the PayPal fee calculators I could find just to see what else is out there and to show people all of their available options. I've separated them into two categories, "Online" and "Offline" and I've organized them by date going from newest to oldest. If you know of another PayPal fee calculator that's not on this list, leave a comment on this page and I'll be sure to add it.

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I've always been fascinated by clipboard monitoring programs, you know those little programs that sit in the background and record everything that gets copied to the windows clipboard. However, sometimes it's difficult to find these types of programs in search engines because they're known by so many different names. After spending a number of hours searching in Google and other various shareware sites I was able to compile this list of windows clipboard monitoring programs:

ClipX
Hamsin Clipboard
CLCL
Ditto
ArsClip
Clipdiary
Visual Clipboard
ClipGuru
Yankee Clipper III
Clipboard Recorder
ReClip
TrayClip
Clip-O-Matic
ClipMate
Clipboard Genie
Clipboard Helper

All of these programs do basically the same thing, they monitor and record the windows clipboard. But how exactly do they do it? I recently looked online for some type of guide or tutorial that could show me how it's done in Visual Basic but I couldn't find anything so I decided to write my own. Before writing this guide, I wanted to find out as much information as I could about the windows clipboard and more specifically how clipboard monitoring works. I found two great books on the subject, Programming Windows by Charles Petzold and Subclassing and Hooking with Visual Basic by Stephen Teilhet for Visual Basic specific information. Both of which are excellent and I highly suggest picking them up.

Here's a simple step-by-step guide that shows how to create your own Visual Basic program that can monitor what gets copied into the windows clipboard.

Download clipboard_monitor.zip (March 11, 2009)

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Here's a simple Visual Basic program I wrote back in June 2005 called "Form Size Finder". I originally wrote this because I wanted to make a program that was the exact same size as another program I was using and I didn't know how to find the original program's width and height. This program is composed of a small form you drag around the screen and resize. As you do so it gives you detailed information about itself including it's width, height, and corner coordinates. To match another program's dimensions, you would simply open it up, overlay it on top of the program you want to know the size of, and then resize it to the other program's exact dimensions. Even if you don't use it for it's intended purpose, I think it still may be useful to Visual Basic beginners to see how "Always on top" works, how to drag a form around by clicking on it's body, how to use the StatusBar and SpinButton controls, and how to use the SetWindowPos, GetCursorPos, GetWindowRect, ReleaseCapture, and SendMessage Win32 API's.

Download form_size_finder.zip (June 06, 2005)

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After releasing my VB Keyword Combiner yesterday I started doing some research to see if anyone else had written a similar tool. I was looking for a tool (either web-based or downloadable) that could combine multiple keyword lists together for use in Adwords or any other PPC advertising program. I wasn't expecting too many results, but to my surprise I found quite a number of them in searches for "keyword combiner" and "keyword combination".

Since the majority of the results I found were web-based tools, I decided to make a web-based version of my own. My Adwords Keyword Combiner is a web-based tool that allows you to enter a list of base keywords, then optionally a list of prefix and suffix keywords and it will generate a new list that contains all possible combinations of the 3 keyword lists.

But how can this be useful? Here's an example. Let's say you owned a website that sold shoes and you wanted to use Adwords to advertise your site. Rather than bidding on a broad serch term like "shoes", you would more than likely bid on a more descriptive search term such as "nike shoes" or "reebok shoes". To make it even better you might even bid on keyphrases containing individual shoe sizes, such as "nike shoes size 10" or "reebok shoes size 11" that bring users to individual product pages with those sizes pre-selected. But what if you had 100 different brands of shoes available on your site and each shoe came in 6 different sizes. That's 600 different possible keyword combinations. On top of that, what if you wanted to bid on the keyword "shoe" and "shoes", that's now 1200 different possible combinations. It would be rather tedious writing out all those keyword variations by hand so that's why I wrote this tool. You simply give it a base word such as "shoes", then tell it which words you want to add before that word, such as "nike" and "reebok", then tell it which words you want to add after that word, such as "size 10" and "size 11". Then it will generate all the different possible combinations that can be made from those words.

Any comments or suggestions are appreciated. Thanks!

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