Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

No, not another ad featuring happy guys out in the woods singing to each other and giving out hugs (not that there's anything wrong with that), but more the sort of "hey, why can't I send mail to Yahoo!?" sort of problem.

Turns out there's a page dedicated to handing just this sort of thing, at the easy to remember postmaster.yahoo.com, where folks will work with you to try and figure out what happened and get you back talking to our servers.

Well, unless you're trying to sell discount herbal versions of the stuff they're singing about in those morning woods commercials...

We've covered enhanced shortcut modules in Yahoo! Search before, but the new module for musicians is the first to really do something that surprised me. When you search for a particular group's name, a big ol' box with pictures and links pops up above the first result, except now it includes a set of music videos that you can click on. When you do, instead of sending you over to a new page, the video player actually pops up in a lightbox, which is very cool looking if nothing else.

I also noticed that we improved our lyrics shortcuts a little while back to allow you to get lyrics for a particular title, a nice improvement over the previous behavior that only allowed you to get shortcuts based on artist names.

EDIT: Wow, as mike pointed out in the comments, I somehow entirely missed the coolest feature of this module: you can play the 30 second samples of the artist's most popular songs inline on the search page. That's really sweet.

The YUI folks sure have been busy as of late. They just released a new library set chock full of new toys. Including a color picker, rich text editor, a javascript dependency loader, and a very cool data table control for easy, fast data layouts.

These are some insanely useful items, and yes, the docs are full of examples and cheat sheets. The YUILoader is actually pretty interesting when you consider that it could be used for things like widgets, or AIR apps, or even dynamic loading of components for extensible modules (to do things like load components on demand rather than pre-loading).

Huh, that might shave a few seconds off of a page load...

Full details at the YUI blog.