I’ve recently discovered the great work by Jack Slocum in his Yahoo Extensions library. Basically, he has taken the YAHOO User Interface library (YUI) and extended it to the point of creating his own very useful framework.
If you want a robust, cross-browser user interface JavaScript library, I urge you to check out this guy’s work. So far I have been very impressed, and am looking for ways to incorporate his work into my own development.
Internet Explorer 7.0 has been released. I’ve been waiting for this release for some time, and am glad to see it out in the wild this year. The main reason is because our AJAX application suffers from the old SELECT problem, and the MSHTML-rendered versions are going to be a life-safer. There are also some JavaScript optimisations of interest.
A great logging/trace tool I have been using in my AJAX applications is log4javascript. Essentially, it is a JavaScript implementation of log4j, the defacto standard in Java logging. I cannot stress how much this has helped me knowing what is going on inside the code (especially given our framework is largely event-driven).
The new version of Internet Explorer is out, this time in Release Candidate form. Everything looks on track for a release 4th quarter this year.
From IEBlog:
The RC1 build includes improvements in performance, stability, security, and application compatibility. You may not notice many visible changes from the Beta 3 release; all we did was listen to your feedback, fix bugs that you reported, and make final adjustments to our CSS support.
On a related note, Ajaxian is running an article on the various CSS changes in IE7.
Recently, eBay announced an increase in fees and other measures specifically targeting eBay store owners. Now, you would only expect fees to increase once in a while – we all realise that eBay is a business after all.
There are three things that I want to address:
I would also like to state outright that I am writing this with some bias. My wife runs an eBay store called Discount Craft Supplies, and sells exclusively via the Store Inventory format. It should be noted that most items in the store are priced well below $5.
Cutting to the chase, Bill Cobb, eBay North America President, had this to say in the July 2006 announcement.
Amid all this change, one thing has remained constant: auction-style listings are the foundation of eBay. Auction-style and other core listings made eBay what it is today - and they’ll always be front and center on eBay.com. They account for about 91% of the gross merchandise value sold on eBay.com. But recently, we’ve been wrestling with some troubling facts:
- Store Inventory listings now comprise about 83% of active eBay.com listings on average.
- While eBay.com core listings typically sell in about two weeks, Store Inventory listings on average take 14 times longer to sell. In some media categories, Store Inventory listings take more than 40 times longer to sell than core listings.
- And, when you compare our operations costs for an average Store Inventory listing and an average core listing - factoring in the duration of each - our cost to host a Store Inventory listing is more than 50% higher than for a core listing. In fact, current Store Inventory insertion fees don’t cover eBay’s costs for hosting them.
It’s vitally important - to your business and ours — that we maintain a healthy balance between listing formats on the eBay marketplace, and ensure that inventory conversion across the site remains strong. So we’re taking action.
Let’s start with the fee increases - which were quite steep. For owners of eBay stores that operate on moving large volumes with small profit margins (like my wife), the news was devastating. Ina Steiner, of AuctionBytes explains.
eBay is increasing both listing and commission (Final Value) fees for Store inventory effective August 22. Listing fees will rise 150 percent for items under $25 and will rise 400 percent for items priced at $25 and over. Commission fees will rise 25 percent for items $25. For items priced over $25, the percentage increase in rates is variable depending on the selling price.
Furhter to this, the commission changes for eBay Australia were higher, going from 5.25% to 10%.
So you might be saying “well, why not just do Buy It Now auctions?” Well, there is a really good reason. eBay charge 50c for a Buy It Now auction, on top of the initial insertion fee. So, if you were selling scrapbooking paper at 99c, you can quickly see how that doesn’t make any sense.
That brings me to my next gripe. As of writing, Store Inventory items no longer appear below the Auction listings when a buyer performs a search. The buyer now has to specifically click on Buy It Now, and even then store items only appear if no auctions are found.
My wife’s traffic, funnily enough, plumetted once they introduced this, and of course, sales have suffered.
The third gripe has to be the notice period. eBay sent an announcement to all store owners one month before they were going to introduce the new fees. Worse, they only gave two weeks notice about the listing visibility changes.
So what has the fall out been since the announcement?
A lot of Power Sellers (yes, people who generate $3000+ sales a month) aren’t too happy. Some store owners who are being screwed over by these measures are shutting their stores down, either moving to auctions only, or moving to completely different sites (such as OZtion).
Finally, eBay created an ecommerce marketplace centred around the concept of stores. eBay provided a place for low-margin, high-volume sellers of small items to set up shop, and these people have, until now, prospered. To all of these people, many of them small businesses, eBay has said “f**k off”.
JSON is now an RFC standard (4627). This is great news, as I have been a major user of the format for quite some time now in my AJAX applications. (via Sleepyhead.)
Douglas Crockford should be congratulated for his continued work in this area.
CFjsmin v2.0 (beta) has been released. Specifically, this version adds support for compressing JavaScript strings.
Key features:
Today I experienced a very strange problem, that I think a few of you have also experienced. If you are using SSL and IIS together, there is a known bug that prevents attachment downloads from working correctly if you are using cache control headers.
So, the following will not work.
But this will work.
Simile Timeline is a pretty cool project from the guys at MIT. They have developed a flexible timeline widget in DHTML that can be rendered horizontally or vertically. It uses XML as the datasource, and seems to cope with large datasets quite well. For instance, one of the examples plots 2000 years of Jewish history.
I think I will be playing with this at work, as we want to plot client activity within our CRM.
Thanks to the guys at Ajaxian for finding this.
Microsoft released IE7 Beta 3 yesterday. The new beta contains the following enhancements:
The reordering of tabs has of course been in Firefox for some time, but it is interesting that this feature has come about in IE7 because of feedback from beta users. Another one of the small but worthy improvements is the changes to image zooming. I think Max Stevens puts it best:
IE6 featured auto scaling of large images to fit the browser window, and it had this weird button that would show up over the top of the image after some indeterminate amount of time. It felt a little odd to use, and was somewhat unpredictable. In IE7, thanks to Michael, we’ve replaced this with a simple magnification cursor. Now, you can click to zoom the image to full size, and the image will be centered on where you clicked.
This is the last beta for IE7, with Release Candidates to follow. It looks as though Microsoft are scheduling a release for the second half of the year.