#!etsyhacks

I’m very excited to be able to announce that I will shortly be quitting my day job and, er, getting a new day job - at Etsy.

I’m being hired as a QA Engineer, responsible for testing the site and any new features as they come along. I’m not being hired as a front-end developer - Etsy already has a very talented pool of developers. I’m not going to be parachuting in, waving a magic wand, and adding Etsyhacks features to the site. I know Etsy see the value of the features the hacks provide, and hopefully I’ll be part of getting some of them integrated into the site in due course, but only as and when it makes sense within Etsy’s existing development plan.

Meanwhile, Etsyhacks will continue to exist for as long as it provides a useful service, although the pace of development is likely to slow while I get to grips with my new job.

Thank you all for making Etsyhacks the success it has been so far. Your support and encouragement has been wonderful, and I appreciate it very much. I look forward to being able to contribute even more to your Etsy experience as I embark on this new phase of my career.

I’ve just added some new “etsyhacks” instant messaging account. You can now talk to me as “etsyhacks” on Google, Yahoo, and AIM, “ian at etsyhacks dot com” on MSN, and “376144688″ on ICQ.

Another much-requested hack - renew listing. This one lets you renew an item directly from its View Listing page.

Turned out to be a lot simpler than I’d expected - just like Edit This Item, but with a form submission instead of a clickable link.

A new one for me - some bookmarklets that come before a Greasemonkey version!

These new bookmarklets - add tags, replace tags, and delete tags - help you enter or edit your tags quickly when creating or editing a listing. Fire the bookmark, paste in your tags, hit “OK” and you’re away. Good for those of you who have sets of tags pre-prepared in a text document somewhere and who like to cut-and-paste to create listings. (But see also the new Copy Listing Greasemonkey hack.)

They were an interesting exercise in “JavaScript Golf” (get a functioning script in as few characters as possible) since - due to a limitation in a version of IE 6 - you need to get everything within 488 bytes (actually more like 460 since there’s some standard rubbish that needs to be included).

There will be a Greasemonkey version in due course….

My hack version numbers were vexing me. I’d originally started numbering at version 0.1 and then increased the number by 0.1 for each release. Then I started adding 0.1 for a bug fix release, and moved up to the next integer for a new feature.

Between that change of numbering system, and the desire to have some room in the 0.x range for beta releases, I’ve gone through and renumbered all the hacks so they start at 1.0 and work on up. I’ve also altered some version numbers to suit the 0.1=bug/1.0=feature change.

So, the version numbers should now be sane, at the cost of me feeling rather anal-retentive about the whole thing. The only drawback is that the RSS feeds will have a bunch of different links in them, which may well show up as new items in your RSS reader, so if you’re reading the “hack updates” feeds, my apologies.

Something that’s always annoyed me about listing is that it’s not possible to create a new listing based on an existing one. You can relist a sold item and edit the content, but that’s not always possible or desirable, and, well, it’s just a bit ick.

Enter the latest hack - Copy Listing. This takes the data from an existing listing, and then fills in the fields of the new listing as you go.

The one thing it doesn’t do is copy the photos, which vexes me. But the photos are uploaded files, and that’s kind of hard to fake. It’s not impossible, I think, but it’ll take work and time, and I decided it was better to get this code released now than to wait for me to have time to sort out lying to the file upload script.

It seems like it’s an itch that many have needed scratching. Do tell all your friends….

So, I’ve been neglecting my Greasemonkey-using audience, and decided I’d quickly make amends with a short-but-sweet new hack: fast batch feedback.

savor suggested this hack on the forums and I realised it should be fairly easy to do. I can only work with what’s on the page, so I can’t do the “show 100 per page” bit, but the rest wasn’t too difficult to do.

I did originally allow you to set “neutral” or “negative” feedback, but the potential for mis-feedbacking on a grand scale was rather too large to countenance. Plus, if you’re leaving negative or neutral feedback, you really should be thinking about each one….

So, now all you have to do is make enough sales to care!

So, all is quiet on the Greasemonkey and Bookmarklet front right now, because I’m working on “EtsIntelligence“, a site that will provide some sales intelligence (and other) tools for your Etsy shops.

The plan is to start with a search interface for sold orders, a “what else did this buyer buy from me?” search, and order and transaction notes. There will be associated Greasemonkey scripts to integrate it tightly with the Etsy UI, and bookmarklets that will provide more limited integration for non-Greasemonkeying users.

From there, I plan to add number crunching - integrating your Etsy bill, adding sales graphs, that sort of thing. I also have some ideas about buyer profiling that might be interesting.

I’m doing the dull work of setting up basics of the web site - user management, etc. - now, but hope to be beta testing by the end of January.

I’ve just created a new section on etsyhacks.com - Bookmarklets. A bookmarklet is a little program that you add to your favourites (or “bookmarks”) and then you run it by clicking on that bookmark. They offer an alternative to Greasemonkey for those that can’t (or won’t) install it.

They aren’t as powerful as Greasemonkey, but I’ll try to offer Bookmarklet alternatives for the Greasemonkey scripts where possible. Currently I’ve released bookmarklets to do the work of the Buyer Info and Edit This Item hacks.

Hopefully they’ll be useful to the IE-users out there and, maybe, encourage them to make the move to Firefox for all that Greasemonkey can offer them!

I’ve just released the new Chat Window Tweaker hack.

When you click on a link in Etsy Chat, it opens in a new window (or tab). When you click on another link, it opens in that same tab, over the top of the previous one. I’ve not used Chat all that much, but even in that little amount of time that annoyed me, so I fixed it. It’s very similar to the Treasury Window Tweaker hack.