Use a standalone HTML editor or word processor to format your listing descriptions.
Sometimes, the only way to achieve a desired effect in a listing description is to hand-code the HTML [Hack #52] , or so they would lead to you believe.
If you’re a WYSIWYG purist (as opposed to an ASCII purist or a sushi purist), you may prefer to create your complex page layouts with a dedicated graphical web page editor, such as Mozilla Composer (free as part of Mozilla Suite, www.mozilla.org), HTML-Kit (free from www.chami.com/html-kit), or a full-blown commercial product like Dreamweaver (www.macromedia.com). Or, if you’re most comfortable using a good ol’ word processor (e.g., Word-perfect or Word), you can output to HTML as long as you’re using a recent release of the software.
The problem is that web page editors are designed to generate complete HTML pages rather than snippets to be inserted into other pages. This means that you’ll need to modify the generated HTML code before inserting it into one of your listings. Otherwise, your page may not display correctly and may even interfere with people’s ability to bid on your item.
To avoid such display problems, open the generated HTML file in a
plain text editor (e.g., notepad in Windows) so you can see the HTML
tags. The actual body of the page is contained within a <body></body> structure, so all
you need to do is delete everything before the opening <body> tag and everything after the
closing </body> tag, as well as
the tags themselves. Then, select everything that’s left (Ctrl-A), copy
it to the clipboard (Ctrl-C), and paste it (Ctrl-V) into the description
field on eBay’s Sell Your Item form
[Hack
#43] or into the description box in Turbo Lister [Hack
#93] .
Obviously, this process can be a little cumbersome, especially if you’re creating a few dozen listings at a time. To speed up the process, use “Extract HTML page content,” a component of Creative Element Power Tools (www.creativelement.com/powertools; free demo and $18 thereafter). After saving in your web page editor, right-click the HTML file and select Extract Page Content. The tool will automatically extract the necessary code and copy it to the clipboard, at which point you can paste it right into eBay’s description field. No editing necessary!
Most web page editors don’t do a very good job of discriminating between files on your hard disk and files that will eventually be on web servers. Case in point: you use a graphical editor to place a photo in your auction description, but when you upload it to eBay, your customers complain that the image is broken.
What likely happened is that your editor generated code that looked like this:
<img src="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Dave/My%20Documents/
auctions/bowling%20ball.jpg">As you can see, the <img>tag [Hack
#52] references a file on your hard disk
(C:/Documents and Settings/Dave/My
Documents/auctions/bowling ball.jpg) rather than a file on
a web server [Hack
#76] (the %20 codes in the examples represent the
spaces in the pathname). Of course, you have access to your hard disk,
so it looks fine when you view the listing; but to anyone else who
doesn’t have a photo of a bowling ball in the same place on her own
hard disk, the image will appear broken. To fix this, you’ll have to
replace the folder name with the URL of the file
on your server
[Hack #76] . While you’re at
it, remove the space from the filename. When you’re done, the link
should look like this:
<img src="http://www.your.server/auctions/bowlingball.jpg">
Your customers will finally be able to see the bottle cap stuck in the middle finger hole.
If you generate a page with a Microsoft Office application such as Word, Excel, or Powerpoint, the resulting HTML will be clogged with tons of extraneous codes that should be removed before you use it in an eBay listing.
The easiest way to do this is to use the Microsoft Office 2000 HTML Filter 2.0, available for free at www.microsoft.com/downloads. (Despite the name, it works with all versions of Office, including Office XP and Office 2003.) To clean your Office HTML documents, open the filter, click Add to select one or more files, and then click Apply.
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