October 31, 2006

APIs found a new home on yahooapis.com - Flash developers: Immediate action required

When we launched our first APIs for Search, they were all located on api.search.yahoo.com. With an API offer that is growing every month, we have to separate APIs and our consumer offerings to make both easier to manage. All services that we offered on api.-property-.yahoo.com are now available at .yahooapis.com as well. Please refer to the documentation for details. Starting today, new APIs, updates and bug fixes will only be available on the yahooapis.com and in the mid-term we are planning to turn off the old endpoints so please update your applications as soon as possible.

Important for Flash developers: You need to update your applications with the new endpoints by December 11th because api.-property-.yahoo.com will no longer support Flash calls after that date.

We know that this will have a big impact for some of you and we apologize for that. Yahoo APIs infrastructure is still fairly new and we want to optimize the set-up now so that we don't have to make those changes in the future.

Dan Theurer

Posted at 9:12 AM | Comments (9)

October 27, 2006

BBAuth Perl Module Available on CPAN

I was poking around on CPAN recently as part of getting a Perl Development Center put together (coming soon) and happened to run a search for "yahoo bbauth."

Imagine my surprise to see that Jiro Nishiguchi has already created Yahoo::BBauth.

Excellent!

Jeremy Zawodny

Posted at 1:35 PM | Comments (0)

October 22, 2006

Yahoo! Answers on the go, powered by the Answers API

I have a friend who regularly calls me from his cell phone with random questions that he hopes I can answer. The conversation usually goes like this:

Friend: "Hey, are you near a computer?"
Me: "Yes." (I usually am.)

Then he proceeds to ask me a question that I type into Yahoo! Answers and I read the answer back to him. Anything for a friend, right? But so inefficient!

Now my friend won't need to use his phone to call me to ask his questions -- now he can go straight to the source using Yahoo! Answers on Mobile built on the Yahoo! Answers API. Read Kevin's blog for the details on why he built the application (Kevin is a "soccer dad" in Colorado).

The Answers team here at Yahoo! loves it and Jeremy does a nice job of putting Kevin's work into the bigger picture of what open APIs mean.

As Eric Raymond famously wrote, "Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch." Kevin's particular itch was understanding soccer since his daughter had just started playing, but yours is probably different. Take your pick among our many services and surprise us with your creation -- the possibilities are indeed infinite.

Chad Dickerson
Yahoo! Developer Network

Posted at 11:04 PM | Comments (2)

October 10, 2006

Comments, Anyone?

Not too long ago someone mentioned that it wasn't obvious how to get in touch with those of us on the Yahoo! Developer Network team. That surprised me until I took a fresh look at our web site myself.

It turns out that if you aren't using one of the API specific mailing lists we've setup, there really isn't an obvious route to us. To partially help that (we have more planned), we'll be enabling comments on all future posts to the YDN blog.

Of course we'll be on the lookout for spam (a sad fact of online life). We've also added our standard comment policy in the sidebar. As long as things stay on topic and respectful, there's shouldn't be much trouble.

Jeremy Zawodny

[Seriously: please keep comments relevant to the Yahoo! Developer Network. I've been removing a lot of off-topic comments here recently.]

Posted at 1:53 PM | Comments (25)

October 6, 2006

Minor Update Unleashed

Minor updates to my PHP quickstart and Python class for Yahoo! Browser-Based Authentication happened in the past day or so. The updates are not critical but you're better off with them. Thanks to Python pros Simon Willison and Mark Nottingham for their ongoing Python assistance.

Got .NET? Don't miss our HOWTO's for using BBauth in both C# and VB. Resident .NET expert Tomi Blinnikka shows us all how it's done.

Jason Levitt

Posted at 6:50 PM

October 5, 2006

Video walk-through of Yahoo!'s BBAuth

Dan Theurer explains what Browser Based Authentication is and walks through an example of how it works in this very short (5 min.) and very low-fi screencast.

(We did this in one take, and, yes, that is in fact my laptop's backup software that pops onto the screen at minute 4.)

Matt McAlister

Posted at 4:38 PM

BBauth And Photos Code Unleashed

Fresh off of our mega-successful Hack Day, we've got lots of code samples to feed your lust for Browser-Based Authentication and Photos APIs, and in multiple languages no less!

In our Ruby Developer Center, we've got a Ruby wrapper for BBauth by Premshree Pillai, as well as links to a Rails plug-in by Cameron Walters and Scott Fleckenstein, and a tutorial by Erik Kastner.

In and around our PHP Developer Center, PHP examples abound.
In the Yahoo! Application Gallery, Kent Brewster shows off his nifty YBBS, a prototype forum written in PHP that uses BBauth for authentication, and I have a Drupal module and a Wordpress plug-in that implement BBauth for the Drupal CMS and for Wordpress blogs.

Need a little more hand-holding? I've got a PHP Quickstart bundle that can get you up and running using BBauth in a pinch, and also contains my PHP4 and PHP5 classes for BBauth..
Dan Theurer also has a PHP tutorial about implementing Single Sign-On using BBauth on his blog as well as a nifty Photos application that uses BBauth.

Can't get Photos uploads to work? My PHP samples show how easy it is to upload photos into a Yahoo! Photos account using BBauth and the Photos API.

What about Coldfusion? Dov Katz has written a fine demo with source that implements BBauth for Coldfusion developers. Check it out in Gallery!

For Python, my BBauth class and mod_python example are now in the Python Developer Center.

Jason Levitt

Posted at 1:10 PM

October 4, 2006

Open Hack Day Winners

Here are the winning hacks from our first open Hack Day, described in the hackers' own words.

• Best Overall: Blogging in Motion: wearable technology. Blog from your purse. - Diana Eng, Emily Albinski, Audrey Roy
• Second Place: YBox: Turn TV into a simple, web configurable dashboard. - Josh Rooke-Ley, Tarikh Korula
• Third Place: Search Hack with Dynamic Tagging: Semantic Search using Yahoo Search API for Seed Documents, Evan Hoff
• Best Sharp OSA Hack: Print a Pretty Impromptu Poster, pick a Flickr tag and print impromptu posters on the colour photocopier. - Ben Metcalfe (with assistance from Tim Shattuck)
• Best Social Commentary: Y! Space. It's like Yahoo! 360. But not for old people! - Winona Tong
• Too Useful: shill.icio.us. Find users who are trying to drive traffic to their sites by artificially boosting del.icio.us popularity. - Jason Gurney
• Best Schtick (and Worst Hack): Blabber. It's a talking head! Except it has the same voice as you! - Mo Kakwan
• Best Messenger Hack: Lingo! Y!Messenger plugin to help put Yahoo! Services in Context. - Kristopher Tate, Matt Olson, Qingfeng Huang, Aiguo Fei
• Best Messenger Hack, Second Place: Plaxo Yahoo Messenger Plugin. A plugin for Yahoo messenger that allows you to look up your friends' Plaxo contact information. - Trevor Gattis, Amber Haq
• Best Messenger Hack, Third Place: Ask questions to Y! Answers from Messenger. Allows users to ask question by typing their request into a messenger secondary window. - Sharan, Vincent
• Best Upcoming Hack: Gutentag. Describe yourself, then find people, events, and places that you'll love but would have never known about. - Josh Dewald, Mabel Liang, Taylor Dondich
• Best Local/Maps Hack and Worst Kiss-Ass (for comments made to the moderator during the demo): Road-Trip Radio. Take a trip down the coast and know exactly when and where to turn that dial...so you never miss a moment of your favorite NPR or radio program (and don't have to buy a satellite radio)! - AJ Arora
• Best Flickr Hack: The Color Field Camera. A 1950s snapshot camera with built-in LCD screen. Blends live video with flickr images that match the color of the object in the center of your view. - Bjoern Hartmann (presenting)
• Best Mail Hack: Yahoo! Mail with Flickr Image Association. Use photographic association to easily recall and visualize email. - Dan Lindquist
• Best Mail Hack, Second Place: Flickr Photo Postcard. Send a postcard of a Flickr photo to a friend's email. Just find a cool photo on Flickr, click the send postcard button, fill in the email and message, and click send! - Leah Culver, Tantek Celik
• Best Mail Hack, Third Place: Something With Your E-Mail. Just a draft of turning microcontent from email to actionable goodness. - Christine Hodges

Full details are on the Hack Day blog; pictures are on Flickr; links are on del.icio.us. Enjoy!

Kent Brewster, Yahoo! Developer Network

Posted at 2:38 PM | Comments (3)

October 3, 2006

getTime Service Updated

Upon request we added the 'format' parameter to the getTime service that controls the return format of the timestamp. The choices are milliseconds since 1970 or a UNIX timestamp with seconds since 1970. This addition makes the timestamp easier to use in JavaScript because the Date Object counts time in milliseconds.

Dan Theurer

Posted at 1:52 PM | Comments (0)

October 2, 2006

Love All, Support All. The .NET Developer Center Is Here!

Friends of Redmond, start your engines! Today we're launching our .NET developer center to help you kick start development with the Microsoft .NET Framework and Yahoo! services. We even threw in some XAML love for all you budding Windows Presentation Foundation devs. Feel the urge to use Browser-Based Authentication with ASP.NET? No problem, we've hooked you up with an easy to use class that will get you rolling onto the road of glory in no time. All the samples are available in C# and VB.NET online and in a downloadable Sample Browser application (with source, no less!).

Also, we've got a brand spankin' new Yahoo! group: ydn-dotnet. Join, ask, contribute, and let us know what we can do to help.

Tomi Blinnikka

Posted at 8:00 PM