Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

I'm sitting in a mostly empty building.

Granted it's during the Shutdown that Became the not shut down, and I really didn't feel like burning vacation time. Still, it's kinda lonely. I wish someone would call me. Good thing that it's free (well, in the US at least.)

So, to you, yours and your nots, may the new year be such that you regret seeing it end.

Whaddya mean, "that's not very upbeat?" It's better than my "May you avoid being eaten by a grue." one.

Merry Christmas to all of you folks that celebrate that sort of thing! To get you into the appropriate mood, check out the whole series of holiday logo animations from the Yahoo! home page --- 1 - 2 - 3 - 4. The full animations activate when you mouse over them (after the intro animation), if you were wondering. I think that last one isn't released yet.

Remember, we probably won't be updating this week, so, as JR keeps alluding to, enjoy the vacation from my bad puns! (man, whatever, I think they're clever)

This post is about Yahoo! 360°, blog entries, and tagging. Hm, how should I indicate that...? Ah, this convenient "edit tags" interface should help!

Excellent! Now th...wait, hold on, that's just an image! Tagging your blog entries with relevant keywords sure seems easier (and less JPEG) in Yahoo! 360°, now that they've added a feature that allows you to, you guessed it, tag your blog entries with relevant keywords. It's also a cinch to find posts that you're interested in, thanks to not only these fancy tags, but also an improved old-fashioned search function. Actually, there's a whole bucketload of new features on 360° that you can read about in an appropriately bucket-sized post from the 360° team. Here's the high-level overview:

• Revamped searching
• Blog tagging
• An improved blog editor
• Blog list view
• No more "Friends of Friends of Friends" (three more "of Friends", and we'd be talking about Kevin Bacon!)
• Required Flash upgrade
• More Interesting pages
• Stats tweaking

Hopefully these updates will give you something blog-related to keep busy with over the next week, because we'll most likely be taking a break from posting here until the New Year. Hooray vacation! A merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, krazy Kwanzaa, and wonderful holiday season to you all!

What? No crappy pun? Ah well...

So Del.icio.us recently released a new widget that allows you to make adding pages to del.icio.us even easier. Naturally, I wanted to add it here. What's more, it gave me a chance to poke around in the code and discover a few things.

First a few words about Wordpress. If you haven't created a custom theme yet, you really need to. It's not hard, and it makes things like this not disappear when you upgrade next time.

Ok, now that you've done that, the bits you need to add are pretty straight forward. In your brand new theme directory, you need to modify index.php and single.php.

Near the top of the file add:
<script type="text/javascript">
if (typeof window.Delicious == "undefined") window.Delicious = {};
Delicious.BLOGBADGE_DEFAULT_CLASS = 'delicious-blogbadge-line';
/* Set manual mode so that we can have multiple badges */
Delicious.BLOGBADGE_MANUAL_MODE = 1;
</script>
See that last line? That's kinda key. That's what keeps the script from running instantly.

Inside the post loop, add:
<script type="text/javascript">
Delicious.BlogBadge.writeBadge('delicious-blogbadge-<?php the_ID(); ?>',
'<?php print get_permalink(); ?>',
'<?php print preg_replace('/\'/',"/\\'/",get_the_title()); ?>', {});
</script>

and then, near the end of the page add:
<script>
Delicious.BlogBadge.onload();
</script>
That sets things in motion.

So, what's it do? Well, it adds that thing at the bottom, and customizes it to point to the specific post's URL and use the right title.

Easy? You betcha! Thanks Del.icio.us folks!

We've had a personal search tool for a while now, and while it works great, it's probably not going to really help you find that Pennyman Account document that Bob in Accounting did three years ago.

Fortunately, IBM and Yahoo! linked up to help companies solve that problem. Granted, you'll probably want to run this on a dedicated machine, since it requires 1GB of memory and 80GB of disk space (and works best with dual processors and more memory), but hardware is getting fairly cheap and you can always put it on one of the machines that was going to go sit in the closet anyway, or you could always go pick up a nice cheap machine that fills that requirement for under $500 (a LOT less if you want to get something used from the local computer swapmeet.)

I'll also say that I've not tried it out yet, since I don't have a closet based machine I can put this on yet, but others have and they seem to like it. It's also clearly targeted at smaller businesses (ones with less than 50K of indexable documents), but sometimes you can't beat free.

We've mentioned the lack of threading in Yahoo! Mail Beta before. This is, sadly, not the post where we triumphantly declare that we've implemented real message threading in a fluid, fool-proof manner, but we do have another hacky work-around for you to play with. :D

Basically, if you have a message highlighted in your message list, you can press Ctrl-Shift-Up Arrow or Ctrl-Shift-Down Arrow to skip to the next or previous message in the thread (instead of just going to the next or previous message). This is a feature of Darren's Extended Navigation Hack --- mentioned in this post on the Yahoo! Mail blog --- which by default skips you around your inbox based on message subject, but can also be configured to look for flag status or particular email addresses.

And, no, I have no idea why you have to manually input the email address in the configuration dialog box instead of having an option to find emails based on the sender of the currently highlighted email. Just in case you were wondering. I was...

Just a quick note to let you know that it's not too late to send that holiday greeting to Aunt Millie (since you kinda forgot to pick up a card for her again, didn't you?)

We're sharing our Christmas card with you once again and this year, it features a voice synthesizer so even if you're all caught up, you can still waste hours as your inner 10 year old makes your computer say things it really shouldn't.

(Just remember not to hit send after the Lewis Black-o-matic visits you this holiday. You would not believe what I had to do to make that up to Aunt Millie.)

Just in time for the holidays, Flickr has increased the max upload limits to, well, huge.

Free accounts get a max upload per month of 100MBs (that's a heckuva lot of macro shots of Christmas ornaments), and for folks you're willing to spend $25 bucks on, there's no limit. None. Nada.

C'mon, that's like the price of two Extra Grande Mocca Crappachino with sprinkles, and trust me, Flickr won't mean they have to spend an extra 30 minutes in the gym next week!

Yahoo! Music has launched a Beta version of their video player, dubbed Video 3.0 by Natali Del Conte at Techcrunch (is that really our official name for it? Does it have backwards compatability with Web 2.0?). There are glaring bugs --- if the ad refreshes, your sound might cut out, for instance (pause and play again to fix). Little annoyances, too, like the fact that the seek bar is present, but not functional for actual seeking. Doesn't matter. It works in Firefox (and apparently on Macs)! Bold, exclamation point. Finally. That feature alone makes this update completely brilliant.

Go ahead and try it out by clicking the appropriate link at the top of the Music Videos page (this one). Don't worry, there are a couple of other cool features, too, like an arrangeable lineup and a pretty solid search function. Find out more on the help page and be sure to provide feedback if you find anything broken, think up some good suggestions (no bad ones, please), or just want to thank the Music team for finally allowing you to be your firefoxy self.

It's the wrong season for Easter eggs, so enjoy this Christmas egg from the fine folks at Flickr --- add a note of "ho ho ho hat" or "ho ho ho beard" to make any photo instantly merry. (courtesy of Boing Boing)