Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

Hi, JR here with a bit of news that some folks may be wondering about.

So, as some may know, I'll be leaving Yahoo on June 20th. At that time, I'm also going to be tailing off posting to Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day. I'm not going to be closing it down.

Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day comes out of my pocket. I pay for the domain, I host the site, I do the maintenance and upkeep, and I pluck the weeds (ok, spammers). I fully intend to continue doing so for so long as I have a site.

I want to publicly thank my co-author Sean Montgomery for somehow getting trapped into this. Honestly, without him Y!CoolThing wouldn't be anywhere near as cool and useful. I also want to thank Amit Kumar, Sundar, Sridhar Ranganathan, and everyone else who's pitched in an article, comment or just stopped by to read. It's corny to say, but seriously, without you all, this wouldn't be possible.

Right, so pressing on, there's still plenty of cool to come, in fact, I'll be posting something about that later. See you then.

Man, there it goes again. The site broke right when I was about to start posting. Sorry for the delay! Not that you were missing much, anyway---given that we somehow produced two posts on Saturday, I'm going to make the executive decision that we're subsequently off the hook for today and last Friday. Yay.

Relive those fabulous weekend posting moments:
Flickr Interestingness Calendar
Phishing Protection

Just a quick note to... uhm... note that very early this morning Yahoo! launched it's official company blog at http://yodel.yahoo.com/.

It's still a bit early to get a good feel for it, but considering we've already got a blog that deals with press releases, this won't just duplicate them.

And since I'm an old, cynical hand, let me add a few things to the Yahoo! video walkthrough:

• The coffee, tea, chai, lattes and the like are free. Smoothies aren't, they're $2. Likewise fountain sodas are free. You can get cans of soda for $.25, and juices for $.45 from the various vending machines (Pepsi and Coke machines alternate floors.)
• That big fiberglass cow was part of the Chicago parade of cows. It does email and has a terminal built in.
• We actually do work here too, but I'm guessing showing aisle after aisle of head down engineers doesn't project "fun".
• I'm a bigger fan of the salad bar, but then again, that seldomly explodes into a ball of flame.
• Yeah, we pay for our chow, but it's around $5 a plate, and you don't go hungry.
• We get a lot of fairly big name bands playing here as part of promo tours, bands you've actually heard of. (Sister Hazel, Better Than Ezra, Brandi Carlile, etc.) I... I really have no idea why. I'm not sure they do either.

I've added it to the list on the right, and hopefully Carlo will be adding it to the planetYahoo! feed.

(And I'll try to have something more in the "Cool Thing" category later.)

It means that I (or one of the other folks here) didn't get around to writing anything for today. My apologies, we've got a list of cool things, but we're engineers and live for last minute stuff.

Still, if you're looking for something kinda cool, you may notice that the list of Yahoo! Blogs has grown. Well, it has. That's probably the most accurate list of various product blogs we serve. Dang, there's a lot of them.

To make things a bit easier, I've also added a downloadable bookmarks link. (Yes, I'll add an OPML file containing the various RSS feeds and various other buttons later, but if I had that much time, I would have written a better article.)

Also, if your interested in what else I've been wasting time doing playing with, I've put a copy of Rasmus' Javascript Map on the site at http://ycoolthing.com/map. It's 100% AJAX mappy goodness built using the Yahoo! AJAX map development kit. So all you folks that say Yahoo! only does Flash maps? Time to start microwaving that plate of crow. It even responds to mouse wheeling.

's all for now. Hopefully I, or someone else, will post up something cooler later.

Hi all,
Just a quick site related note. To save you some typing, you can now get here via http://ycoolthing.com. Obviously, old links will still work.

Sorry for the shift. Still getting the kinks worked out.