Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

Sure, you want spiffy javascript effects and cool features, but trying to remember what event labels require the DOM to be frazzengladed the jibberjam on the whoo-dingy.

Or something pretty close to that.

So enter Bill Scott's Protoscript, and insanely simple way to get cool effects by scripting the YUI libraries.

Sometimes there's a flood, sometimes there's a trickle.

Ever want to do a search for something in Answers, but not pick up some other term? Well, here's a few extra tips to make your Y!Answers searches better:

So, say one wants to find answers about long pointy, throwy things without so many references to America's favorite pop-tard. Well, you could try:

spears ANDNOT (britney OR britney OR brittany)

Granted, it's not perfect since she of the Sinead look, seems to have a never-ending assortment of first name misspellings, but it's a start.

Whoops, my fault for breaking our daily update schedule. Las Vegas can be somewhat distracting. :D Equally distracting is the related photos feature that's being phased into Yahoo! Image Search: search for any entertainment- or location-oriented keywords, and you'll get a list of queries at the bottom of the page that other people have been making in relation to your original search -- Brad Pitt turns up Angelina Jolie and Tom Cruise, while London turns up Paris for probably entirely unfrench reasons. I've been super excited about this feature since we started bucket-testing it months ago because it really promotes exploration along themes of photos, similar to the types of paths you'll follow when using Wikipedia. Hopefully the Image Search folks will expand it out to all search queries soon, instead of just the entertaining or locational ones!

Layouts are a pain.

Well, not so much a pain as a never-ending source of frustration, crying, and occasional bouts of goldfish abuse. Ever see a goldfish cry? It's not pretty. Still, between loading your page up with tables (not a good idea since the whole table doesn't render until it's finished), or trying to remember what that quirk was with IE6 vs Opera regarding floating divs, there's a lot of goldfish out there in need of therapy.

Fortunately, YUI makes things a bit easier for you. Turns out they've done all the hard work, and with a bit of simple class labels, you can have spiffy layouts, no questions asked.

Well, ok, one question: What layout should I pick?

Turns out the YUI folks have that one covered too, using the new CSS Grid Builder.

(Oh, and one trick you can use. You can specify multiple classes in your class identifiers. e.g. if you mark something as <div class="foo bar">whatever</div> your browser will apply both ".foo" and ".bar" styles to whatever. That way, you can use your existing styles, but layer in YUI CSS Grids stuff.)

There, wasn't that easy? Now stop yelling at your poor goldfish.
(People are starting to talk, you know.)

Ha, okay, there's not any actual content to this post, but I do love me some ASCII dolphins. ^_^ Be on the lookout for a new next.yahoo.com, coming soon!

Ok, so yesterday it was about pirates.

lolz r in ur flickr feeds, parsing all ur code.

Somedays, the strangeness never ends.

Ahoy, mateys! Today be International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and in th' spirit of celebratin' this joyous occasion, Flickarrrr swapped out thar logo for th' followin' beauty:

Th' landlubbers were fair confused, not knowing what to be expectin', but fer them that live by th' Pirate's Code, 'twas a bonny sight to see. Yarrrr!

(ye also were priv'liged to swap yer language to Pirate fer a day and view a mess o' pirate images in th' Explore pages. More details in th' farrrrrrum thread, I be sad I missed most o' th' excitement)

Back in my college days, I tended to get lost. Very lost. Inevitably, I'd find myself in some long since forgotten corner of the planet with the remains of a six pack of Coke, a half eaten bag of chips a pad of paper and if I was exceptionally forward thinking, a map.

Strangely enough, that pad of paper was usually the most useful thing I had with me since whenever i did manage to find another human being (that didn't look like an axe murderer), I'd pull over and ask for directions. Why, yes, this was before I got married. Why do you ask?

Anyway, many were the times that after such helpful encounters, I wished that I could share my new found knowledge with fellow travelers who did not need to know they had a pretty mouth.

Well, now I can, thanks to Y!MapMixer.

Yessiree, I can take the sometimes helpful scrawlings of those I encountered like so:

and make them more useful by overlaying them on an honest to gosh map, where I can stretch and fit the drawing as needed, and even post it here if I wanted:

True story, two weeks ago a guy was telling me about how much trouble he was having trying to overlay a Portland Transit map on top of an online map. Guess his job is a lot easier now.

I've always been terrible about decorating my room. It's just so much easier to leave all of my walls pristinely white and boring. If I did decide to spice things up a bit, though...probably wouldn't want to take it too fast. Might only want to introduce one new color to my room at a time.

So it's lucky that Yahoo! Shopping has added a Shop By Color feature, which lets you narrow down results based on their dominant image colors. I can just start off with blue posters, for instance, and make sure I can handle that okay before moving on to something more adventurous. Like light green curtains (reason #2 for not decorating: poor sense of color matching). Try it out for yourself by using the color picker on any Yahoo! Shopping results page.

So, there's been rumors aplenty about "Yahoo!'s new Sikkret Social Site" thingy.

Let those rumors be laid to rest, presenting mash.yahoo.com.

Of course, the best description of what mash is would be on the official mash blog. In a nutshell, it's a place where you can play. Where things get interesting is that other folks can play with your page too.

Think part myspace, part wiki, part... well... whatever you want to make it, or your friends make it. Or if you're a particularly trusting soul, whatever you want random strangers to make it. (Best thing is that you have to approve those changes so it's not like you're going to become an unwitting shill for Canadian discount aspirin gambling rings.) Plus, there's a way to revert everything or roll back changes if you, your friend, or random evil person screws things up.

Mash gives you a lot of flexibility to do a bunch of stuff. Applying styling info is pretty straightforward (d'oh, don't include the trailing '/'), as is adding new modules for stuff like videos from YouTube or photo streams from flickr or flash objects (no javascript yet), although there are hints that module development is not far away.

What about 360? Well, everything I've heard is that it's not going anywhere anytime soon. It's my understanding that while 360 is nice, this was the product of one of the first Yahoo! Hack Days and showed how to make profile pages even better. Plus, 360 and Mash are really products for two different audiences, so it makes sense to keep them around. Still, I'm not part of that team nor can I really say what the long term plan is for these. For now, Mash is the toy (honestly, it's as much a toy for us as it is for you. There's some pretty cool tech that we're working on related to this so even if you don't think it's particularly noteworthy, you may want to keep an eye on their blog.)

So, how do you get a page? Well, it's in open beta right now, so you quite literally "have to know someone". The way it works is that "someone" has to create a basic profile page for you and the system sends you an email. You get the email "claim your page" and go to town adding stuff (so yeah, expect some idiot to be selling "invites" on ebay later this week).

Pretty cool.