Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

Julien LeComte is offering folks a preview of the forthcoming YUI Compressor which helps reduce the size of your javascript files by optimizing them. He's definitely looking for feedback if you have it, and it runs as a Java executable so it should work on most platforms.

It's pretty handy way to save bandwidth on bigger mashup projects and make things generally zippier. It's also still very much in beta so best not run it on your only copy of your code. His blog has all the details.

After poking around with some of the new themes in the My Yahoo! Beta, I noticed a useful feature that is undoubtedly old and well-known, but worth noting anyway. If you don't like to waste vertical space with an expansive, albeit pretty, header:

you can select the "Small Search Box" option from the "Personalize this page" menu to save, like, 20 pixels or so. Sweet.

If you haven't been by Yahoo Local today, you may want to check it out.

Last night, Yahoo! Local pushed a completely new version of the site live, and wow is it improved. The top page is definitely more community focused (both in the traditional "hey, what's around here" and the new Web 2.0 "empowering the socialized voicitude of gerundizationing"). That's pretty cool since if you're looking for stuff around somewhere, you're probably more interested in getting info about shops and restaurants before looking at a map. You can still get that though. On the right side of the top bit are tabs for "Most Popular" stuff, local Events, a Map, and "Buzz" (popular tags). Fortunately when you first land, that's animated so you can see what's where.

There's also neat little customization things like that city profile graphic in the banner and a Weekend Guide to find out what's happening around you.

Doing a search for things produces an even cooler page. Yep, it's loaded up with YUI goodness, but it's very functional. Reviews now optionally update as you move the map (you can turn it off), you can zoom the map up to "Huge and useful" level while still keeping lots of info on the page. It's using the nifty Javascript Maps libraries so the flash-phobic have one less thing to worry about. But Wait! There's even more!

They fixed the sorting so that locations with the most highly rated reviews show up above other highly rated locations. There's more content for locations including professional photos and events. Oh yes, and you can comment on reviews and add businesses we might have missed for free. (the link to do it is at the bottom of every page)

Should I mention that it gets straight A's from YSlow?

This is a MORE than welcome upgrade to Y!Local and the effort really shines on this one. Still, if you've got an idea or complaint, let them know. They're listening.

A little while back, we acquired Bix, which is a site for generating contests that can be used to gauge public opinion about just about anything you want. One such example is the ongoing Favorite Liam Contest, where you can pick your favorite animated Liam from Yahoo! Mail.

What really interested me from the blog post about this contest was not the contest itself (though, you know, it's obviously a brilliant idea), but the fact that you can embed a functional Bix voting widget into your website (see link for an example). The widget allows you to make votes, to see how your votes stack up against public opinion, and to keep track of which entries are your current frontrunners. If you're hosting a contest that especially relates to some site you own, it's nice to be able to frame it within that site so your users don't need to jump away and can keep whatever context you want to present to them. I'm not sure if the option is available only after you've created a contest (I didn't see it when I first visited the site), but if that's not the case, you should be able to get the embed code from any contest page by clicking the "Put on website" link in the contest description beneath the voting module.

I'm starting to wonder if the folks in Pipes have coffee pumped straight into their cubes.

Over on the Pipes blog, looks like there yet more new features they released over the weekend.

One of the cooler ones is that now you can have your pipe feed JSON objects back to whatever you want, including Javascript mashups, AIR apps, or really anything that understands JSON.

Still, that's not all they did. They also released a Yahoo! content Shortcuts module and replaced the old content analyzer with a more powerful (and simpler) "Term Extractor". The Shortcuts here are mostly the same sort of quick links you get when browsing articles on Y!News for things like people, places, concepts, and what not. Pretty handy if you're looking for a clever way to find key elements for blogs (and would make for some pretty killer ego-surfing).

Basic computer programming classes have long since dissuaded us from using "goto" as a flow control mechanism, because (among other reasons) it produces "spaghetti code" and just isn't the cool thing to do. But, I dunno, I find spaghetti to be delicious, and apparently so does our Alpha team, responsible for the alpha (beta) search engine. If you type "goto search query", you'll automatically be rerouted to the first search result for that query, which makes it easy to find prominent sites like CNN ("goto news") or Flickr ("goto photos").  It's perfect for all of those people who already use search engines as an address bar (thanks for making Google one of our top search queries, guys), and it's a cute, non-intrusive shortcut to keep you feeling lucky.

Ok, I admit that I've yet to really mess around with Y!Go on something other than a demo phone they had set up, but I'll admit that v.1 was pretty handy. Having all the big Yahoo services in one easy to use bundle was darn useful.

What's more, they're not resting while waiting for various carriers and handset makers to sign off on it, they're still making improvements, and folks seem to be pretty happy with it. Wanna see more? Check out the review over at Download Squad. Oh, and if you've got a WinMobile, Blackberry, Nokia, or any of the phones listed here, you can grab a copy now.

(Supposedly, a version for the Helio Ocean is also coming out soon, which will make me pretty happy.)

We featured a bunch of cool third party Flickr tools in yesterday's post, but the actual Flickr team has been busy, too. Today they rolled out a new version of their web uploader, which allows you to update more photos at once, tag or move your photos into sets en masse, and theoretically get photos up to the Web faster than usual using magic pixie dust (the internet is a series of Pixy Stix?). Plus, it's just a really slick interface and seems to give a much better flow to the upload process. For you old skool users, the basic uploader is still available as well, but I find that you quickly notice the lack of pixie dust.

EDIT: Heads up that there are some known issues with Flash 9 in Linux. Forum thread!

Well, this has been popping up on a few sites, so I figured I should at least mention it here.

The fine folks at Mashable have kindly compiled a list of 100 Flickr tools that you can use. Some of them are silly. Some are darn useful and all are pretty cool.

Kinda nice to see what happens when you open up an API and fill a site with really pretty stuff.

This is a tricky feature to write about, because it's transient and I can't find any sort of demo page. Conveniently, though, it's showing up on the Yahoo! top page right now, so if you run over really quick, you might still be able to catch it! Go!

Okay, but in the high likelihood that you missed it, here's what's up. When we're featuring video on the top page of Yahoo!, there's a new treatment available that allows users to click on the Play Video link here:

And get this nifty inline player (click here to see it in context).

I'm not exactly sure why, but I definitely feel much more inclined to watch a video clip if I can play it without ever leaving the page I'm on, so this is a very welcome and very nicely implemented addition to the ever-evolving top page of Yahoo!.