Monthly Archives: April 2005

ebay tips

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i’ve bought over 10 items from ebay. just recently i almost did not receive the product i paid for. so i talked to a ebay agent at live chat. unbelivably the agent was very competent and gave me quite some valuable information.

give your seller a last chance
in my case, i did not receive my item 16 days after my payment. the agenet recommended me to give the seller a last chance before filing complaint. to get the seller’s phone number:

  1. Click on “Advanced Search” at the top of the eBay page, on the right side.
  2. Click on “Find Contact Information” on the left side.
  3. In the Contact Info section on that page type in your trading partners user id and the item number. Remember that once you ask for contact information, your transaction partner will also receive your contact information.

i did call my seller and she apologized and agreed to overnight my product plus an extra one for free :)

if that didn’t solve your problem, then you can file a complaint at ebay.

even better if you paid with paypal, since ebay owns paypal, you can file a complaint at paypal as well and really trash the seller’s reputation. don’t forget to leave a negative feedback too. you may also contact paypal by phone at 402-935-2050. their phone hours are: 4:00 AM PDT to 10:00 PM PDT 7 days a week.

write better search engine in php

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my limited mysql knowledge always produced inaccurate search results when i write the board search engine. i want to do better this time for the new board so i’m reading this and trying out mysql regular expression and full text search. i’m pretty excited.

oh also, leslie reminded me. this perl style coding will save you from using back slashes and stuff like 

<?=$var?>

PHP CODE:

<?php
f(isset($j_sidebar)) { 
	echo <<<EOF 
	<div id="side"> 
	{$j_sidebar} 
	</div>
	<!--/side--> 
	EOF; 
} 
echo <<<EOF 
<div id="main"> 
{$j_main} 
</div><!--/main--> 
</div><!--/outer--> 
</body> 
</html> 
EOF;
?>

vs.

PHP CODE:

if(isset($j_sidebar)) { 
	echo "<div id=\"side\"> $j_sidebar </div><!--side-->"; 
} 
echo "<div id=\"main\"> $j_main </div><!--/main--> </div><!--/outer--> </body> </html>";</code>

i’ve been using the second for too long, it’s hard to change but it certainly doesn’t hurt to try something different :)

hehe another tip from leslie, you can insert multiple records into one table using just one query:

INSERT INTO blah (blah, blah) VALUES (blah, blah), (blah, blah), ....