Purchases : 0
Sales : 1
Profit : £8.07

My boss Faith like me is hooked on buying and selling – thats why she runs her own business and has done for over 11 years. We often talk about our various money making schemes and it is during these chats that I feel the eBay monkey sitting on my shoulder telling me that there is so much money to be made, so much potential. My eBay monkey wants me to get hooked again – to make enless  journeys to the post office, to check my auctions constantly … to have nightmares about getting that feared negative feedback!

Stories such as One Red Paperclip and Around The World In 80 Trades got me thinking – maybe there is a way to satisfy my eBay monkey whilst putting my entrepreneurial skills to the test and making some cash. Maybe I could buy and sell my way from nothing to something big, something to silence the monkey once and for all.

So where to start? Obviously I need something to sell and preferably something that won’t cost anything to begin with so I don’t start with minus money. Thats where Virgin Media comes in. People who know me should also know i’m not a fan of Virgin Media, so when I remembered the old cable modem I have had lying around for ages I figured this was a pretty good way of VM making it up to me. I have no idea why I have held on to this thing for so long instead of throwing it out – buy maybe VM could start me off on my journey by giving me some start-up cash. A quick search of eBay’s completed listings tells me that on average these can fetch between nothing and £15 so on eBay the VM cabel modem goes… fingers crossed for nearer £15 then nothing. Otherwise this could take a while!

I know there has been far too many “Maybes” in the above paragraphs, but read this space to see how I get on – there could be ups and downs but I think that is part of the excitement. Maybe I will work my way up to serious money only to blow it on an unlucky investment, maybe I will get enough money together to start that café I have always dreamt of. The beauty is there is nothing to loose but potentially so much to gain (too Cliché?)

Keeping your listings up to date can be a real headache which is why having a listing tool such as Auction Nudge that automatically updates and displays your current eBay listings on your website can be a real time saver.

The listings below are generated by pasting one line of code into the HTML of your web page (Note: I am not affiliated with this eBay member in any way.) :

This is generated by the following code :

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.auctionnudge.com/0.5/build.php?ebayID=soundswholesale&type=user&site=uk&cols=2&limit=4&theme=4"></script><div id="auctionNudge"></div>

To get Auction Nudge working on your site you can either copy the above code, changing your eBay ID as necessary and pasting it onto your web page or by visiting Auction Nudge to enter your display settings and get your listing code. There is no registration required and you can view a demo of how your listings will look by just entering your eBay username!

I created my campaign and didn’t mind the fact that that they wanted billing information before they could activate my account – but then I noticed that there was a ‘activaion fee’ of £5 in my case that I needed to ay in order to activate my account. I took another look at the ad – yup “Try it for free – £50.00* FREE advertising. No risk. No obligation” and then I looked at the small print – “A £5 account activation fee or equivalent credit deduction required”.

That sounds neither ‘Free’ or ‘No obligation’ to me.

Perhaps the ad is targeting existing AdWords users where they have already payed their fee? Nope – “The promotional code can only be used for AdWords accounts less than 14 days old”.

It might not have annoyed me if it was aimed at being ‘Free’ to existing members who have already paid their fee, but the fact they are targeting new customers with the promise of ‘No Obligation’ which is a down right lie. You may think that £5 isn’t worth getting worked up over – but I feel this kind of advert is deceiving.

Needless to say I did’t bother continuing my account creation. So all this advert did was waste my time, annoy me and give me yet another reason to dislike the big G.

Rant over.

For example to block my camera all I did was :

touch /Volumes/CAMERA/.metadata_never_index

Now if only there was a setting to block all external drives…

Mac :

Command ('Apple Key') + Shift + Y

Windows :

Ctrl + Shift + Y

This will put the text back to sentence case or lower case (whatever it should be before it was being forced into all caps)

Well now I know why no one used Nochex. It’s rubbish. It’s the only thing that would make me recommend Paypal (and I hate Paypal) to anyone but at least their service does what it is supposed to with minimum fuss.

OsCommerce was working fine and accepted my Nochex account but Nochex wouldn’t accept my address, so I was unable to put a card straight through (as a user without an existing Nochex account might). So I gave up on that as the client offers their own credit card gateway.

So I thought that was that – but when you add a credit/debit card to Nochex they debit a ‘small’ amount from your card to help with their verification process. They didn’t go out of their way to tell you this when you register and they certainly don’t make it clear enough that this is non-refundable!

So there I was waiting for my couple of quid to get refunded only to discover it has been stolen. And for what? … other one for ‘the list’

Whilst booking flights to Australia the other day I was surprised that even the big boys can get it wrong! Although the checkout procedure was smooth – this screen was the first thing I saw after I clicked the “pay” button:


Not exactly confidence building! This page is supposed to redirect the user to their card holders ‘secure code’ page to prevent fraud and authorise payment. However when the re-direct doesn’t work a green screen with a form button seems to be enough to maintain the users confidence confidence!

The method I came up with to solve this is very simple and can be easily added to form elements with little extra code. The error checking is done by checking input against regular expressions.

See the demo and demo source code.

Code Explaination

One function is used to create both forms of error checking:

<?php
$jsChecks = ""; //holds JS error checks
$errorFound = false;	//PHP error flag
 
//Creates both JS and PHP error checks
function errorCheck($elementName, $regExp, $errMsg) {
	global $jsChecks;
	global $errorFound;
	//Create Javascript error checking
	$check = '
	var ' . $elementName . 'Filter = ' . $regExp . '; 
	if (!' . $elementName . 'Filter.test(theForm.' . $elementName . '.value)) { 
		errorMessage += "\n  * ' . $errMsg . '";
		errorFound = true;
	}' . "\n";
	$jsChecks .= $check;
 
	//PHP error checking and return input class
	if(isset($_POST["formSubmitted"])) {	//if form submitted
		if(!preg_match($regExp, $_POST[$elementName])) {
			$errorFound = true;
			return "error"; //css error class
		}
	}
	return "";	//no class if no error detected
}

Error checking is created for the form elements specifying which element (by name), a regular expression to be checked against and a custom error message:

//Create error checking
$nameError = errorCheck("name", "/([a-z0-9]{3}[a-z0-9]?)/", "Name is too short");	//Must be 3 chars or over
$emailError = errorCheck("email", "/^[a-z0-9]+([_\\.-][a-z0-9]+)*@([a-z0-9]+([\.-][a-z0-9]+)*)+\\.[a-z]{2,}$/i", "Invalid Email Address");	//must be valid email address

If no error is found then process the data.

//If no error found
if(!$errorFound) {
	//Process form data...
}
?>

In our head tags we add the following Javascript and CSS rules. The Javascipt checks we created for each element are included here by the PHP ehco:

 
<style type="text/css">
input {
	border: 1px solid #DDD;
}
.error {
	border: 1px dashed #F00;
}
</style>
 
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
function validateForm(theForm) {
	var errorFound = false;
	var errorMessage = "Please correct the following errors:\n";
	<?php echo $jsChecks ?>
	if(errorFound) {
		alert(errorMessage);
	}
	return !errorFound;
}
//-->
</script>

The form is really simple with code to display a CSS class depending on whether a error is detected (for the PHP error checking) and to set the value of the field:

 
<form method="post" onSubmit="return validateForm(this)">
	<label for="name"><strong>Name</strong> (must be 3 characters or over)</label><br />
	<input type="text" name="name" id="name" size="30" class="<?php echo $nameError ?>" value="<?php echo @ $_POST['name'] ?>" /><br />
	<label for="email"><strong>Email Address</strong> (must be a valid email address)</label><br />
	<input type="text" name="email" id="email" size="30" class="<?php echo $emailError ?>" value="<?php echo @ $_POST['email'] ?>" />
	<br />
	<input type="hidden" name="formSubmitted" id="formSubmitted" value="true" />
	<input type="submit" value="Submit" />
</form>

There you are, both Javascript and PHP error checking! See the complete source code here.