Here are some plans for the near future on updates to the site:

- Reply and Quote buttons for post comments, with paged comments and reply nesting. I will also add an email field (optional) to the post comments, should you want to be notified of any replies to your comment.

- Better logo and some more design tweaks.

- Post groups for similar posts or posts in a series. There would be links to each post group on the side bar. So you can easily pull up all Actionscript 3 guide posts, for example.

I did away with the MySQL Fulltext search I was using before. It works great, but its inability to search for important keywords like PHP, AS3, and C++ (due to the character minimum) made it unusable. I replaced it with a custom search engine using a search index I created. I hope it works well!

I did a quick update to the design of the site and shrunk the side bar a little bit. Let me know if you find any bugs or quirks.

I also revised the search, though it is still not doing well with 3 character terms due to the limitation of MySQL Full-Text search. This wouldn't be a problem except important terms like "PHP" are excluded or handled erratically. I will probably add a secondary search feature that takes any short keywords out of the main query and uses a different method to bring up results.

My latest attempt at a trance song. Uplifting I think. Trance/electronic fans let me know what you think!

If you're a trance fan, let me know what you think. This is my producer channel on YouTube. The video should default to 720p automatically. The file size is small though (just an image still) so it shouldn't load slow.

I've made some changes to the categories for the web site. When I initially created them I didn't know exactly what sort of content I'd be putting up here. Now that I'm more clear on that, I have changed the categories to:

Computer Hardware
PC Gaming
Programming
Web and Internet
Miscellaneous

Real-world fuel economy obtained from all www.fueleconomy.gov and www.fuelly.com entries. EPA ratings show the combined MPG rating with new 2008 EPA procedure adjustment, and are averaged in some cases when a single model had different ratings over its model life cycle (with no major changes).

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I work as an online salesperson and sell product on eBay. Over the years eBay's fees have steadily increased, while service has steadily decreased. It has gotten to the point where eBay's (and Paypal's) fees have become a very large dollar amount; an amount that I do not feel is justified. I write this post to share information. Unfortunately I cannot share hard dollar numbers, but I can share approximations and percentages.

Our eBay account receives about 1000 feedback per year, with the items we sell usually between $150 and $800. We have the maximum discounts available for our account level, which is 20% off eBay fees. Despite this, between eBay and PayPal we lose 10% of our gross sales dollars to fees, with 75% of those fees going to eBay and 25% to PayPal. Our profit margins are fairly slim, so the 10% makes a huge impact on the net profit.

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I can't help but comment on the potential 2011 tax increase. There are so many inflamed emotions all around that I think a lot of people are having trouble developing a rational opinion on the matter. I want to imbue some information into this discussion and hopefully some rational insight.


Background

Before going any further, here's a brief look at the historical context of the "Bush tax cuts". These cuts consist of two acts that were passed during George W. Bush's presidency that are set to expire in 2011. The acts are the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 and the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003. Together they lowered the tax rates for nearly every tax bracket, and also created a new 10% tax bracket. Below you can compare the tax brackets during Clinton and during and after Bush:

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Welcome to the 3rd revision of H3XED! The previous design wasn't sitting well with me so I decided I'd update it. I re-wrote the entire site while I was at it, so it should be running a little smoother and faster.

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