Today I've updated my eBay Sales Log spreadsheet to version 1.6. Here's what's been added.

New field for Sales Tax
I've added a new option for Sales Tax. If you charge sales tax on eBay you can now enter the tax percentage you charge in the Tax % column. The yellow column is where you enter your tax rate (for example 6%) and the red column is where you'll see the calculated tax amount show up. Since tax laws vary by state you are given the option of choosing whether to tax just the item price or the item price plus the S&H charge. If you don't charge tax you can either type 0% or leave this field blank.

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Today I've updated my eBay Sales Log spreadsheet to version 1.5. Here's what's been added.

New fields for Tracking Number and Shipping Method
1. I've added new fields for Tracking Number and Shipping Method. Now you can store which shipping method you used to ship your item (for example, USPS Priority Mail) and the tracking number of your package (if you have one). Both of these fields are completely optional. These new fields are right next to the fields for your buyer's name, address and eBay ID.

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This spreadsheet helps you calculate how much it would cost to sell on PriceGrabber Storefronts. You simply enter the price of your item and you can see what your fees and profit would be in a Holiday or Non-Holiday period. For advanced users, there is a way for you to reverse calculate your fees to determine what amount to charge (or what to charge for S&H) to receive the amount you want after fees. You can keep a record of your sales using the included Sales Log worksheet or print out a chart showing what your fees would be for common amounts. You can also reverse calculate price or S&H for a large number of items at once using bonus "Markup" worksheet. If PriceGrabber ever changes their fees in the future (or you want to calculate the fees for another service) you can edit all of the fee rates used by the spreadsheet using the included "Edit Fee Rates" worksheet.
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I've always been a big fan and supporter of OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org is a free, open-source alternative to Microsoft Office that's available for all major platforms and has been downloaded over 100 million times worldwide. Their new Galaxy icon set released with v3.0 is really impressive and as you can see here it's a huge step up from their previous designs. Because I couldn't find a place to download the complete Galaxy icon set anywhere on the OpenOffice.org website, I decided to make my own. I first downloaded the source code to OpenOffice.org, then I extracted out the icons, renamed them and organized them to make it much easier to find the individual icons that you're looking for. While I was looking at the source I also pulled out the icons for all the other icon sets and MimeType icons as well. You can either download each icon set individually or grab them all at once by downloading the all-in-one icon pack I've made below.

Download OpenOffice.org 3.0 Icon Pack (46Mb)

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I was recently hired to do some custom programming work for a website and the site I was working on just happened to have a dicussion forum. As I was browsing around their forum I noticed it was completely overrun by forum spam. I thought this was a real problem so I asked the site owner about it and he said he knew about it but was simply too busy to do anything about it. I started doing some research online to see what could be done about it and I discovered this great site, StopForumSpam.com, which keeps an online database of known forum spammers. Their site allows you to search for a username, e-mail address, or ip address and will tell you if that person has spammed forums in the past. They also have an API you can integrate into your forum registration process and allow you to submit new spam data. You can also download their entire database in CSV format.

To help the site owner I was working with, I was looking for something that would allow him to easily delete all the spam in his forum with just the click of a button. I decided to write a small utility in PHP that would do the job and I call it "Forum Spam Killer". When you run the script it first downloads a list of ip addresses of known forum spammers from StopForumSpam.com then it cross-checks that list against the messages in your forum. When it finds a message posted by a matching ip address, it deletes the message and the user who posted it. Most of the script is self-explanatory, the only thing you have to remember to do is to set your MySQL server details in the PHP file and optionally add any ip addresses you don't want deleted to your whitelist. In my case, I found about 15 IP addresses that were listed on StopForumSpam.com that turned out not to be spammers.

Why am I getting the error message "MySQL Server Gone Away"?
If you press the Kill Forum Spam button and your MySQL server stalls or you get an error message that says something like "MySQL Server Gone Away" or "Packet Size too small" it means your max_allowed_packet size is too small. You need to increase it as per these instructions. In most cases, the script will attempt to do this for you if you have the right privileges. A size of 16mb or more is recommended in your my.ini or my.cnf file as shown below:

[mysqld]
max_allowed_packet=16M

Download it, use it as you like, enjoy!

Download forum_spam_killer.zip (August 03, 2009)