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Thanks to the folks in Yahoo! Search Marketing, we now have a home for the expanded documentation and resources about the Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM) APIs here on YDN.
There you'll find information about the API program, including how to get access, support, documentation, and so on.
If you're an existing YSM API user, fear not. We haven't changed any of the technology. This is simply an effort to pull together more of the information into a single starting page here on the Yahoo! Developer Network.
If you're not an existing YSM API user, take a few minutes and check out the program. Using the YSM APIs you can build a business using Yahoo's Sponsored Search marketplace. That means you can programmatically create advertisements that appear in search results on Yahoo! Search and other sites in the Yahoo! distribution network. The Getting Started Guide will give you an idea of what's available.
As always, let us know what else we can be doing to make it easier to get started with our web services.
Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Developer Network
Posted by jzawodn at 1:55 PM | Comments (2)
Web page designs are getting richer and richer, which means more scripts, stylesheets, images, and Flash in the page. A first-time visitor to your page may have to make several HTTP requests, but by using the Expires header you make those components cacheable. This avoids unnecessary HTTP requests on subsequent page views. Expires headers are most often used with images, but they should be used on all components including scripts, stylesheets, and Flash components.
Browsers (and proxies) use a cache to reduce the number and size of HTTP requests, making web pages load faster. A web server uses the Expires header in the HTTP response to tell the client how long a component can be cached. This is a far future Expires header, telling the browser that this response won’t be stale until April 15, 2010.
Expires: Thu, 15 Apr 2010 20:00:00 GMT
If your server is Apache, use the ExiresDefault directive to set an expiration date relative to the current date. This example of the ExpiresDefault directive sets the Expires date 10 years out from the time of the request.
ExpiresDefault "access plus 10 years"
Keep in mind, if you use a far future Expires header you have to change the component’s filename whenever the component changes. At Yahoo! we often make this step part of the build process: a version number is embedded in the component’s filename, for example, yahoo_2.0.6.js.
Using a far future Expires header affects page views only after a user has already visited your site. It has no effect on the number of HTTP requests when a user visits your site for the first time and the browser’s cache is empty. The impact of this performance improvement depends, therefore, on how often users hit your pages with a primed cache. (A "primed cache" already contains all of the components in the page.) We measured this at Yahoo! and found the number of page views with a primed cache is 75-85%. By using a far future Expires header, you increase the number of components that are cached by the browser and re-used on subsequent page views without sending a single byte over the user’s Internet connection.
Steve Souders
[Steve Souders is Yahoo!'s Chief Performance Yahoo!. This is one in a series of Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site. This article is based on Steve's book High Performance Web Sites, published by O'Reilly.]
Posted by stevesouders at 11:10 AM | Comments (64)
Moving? Investing? Thinking about remodeling? Better do your homework first, starting withYahoo! Real Estate's new Home Values page. Launched this morning, the new page combines three APIs available right here on the Developer Network with two more from Zillow, to provide a 360-degree view of what homes are worth in the neighborhood of your choice.
Yahoo! APIs In Use:
Zillow APIs In Use:
The Developer Network is thrilled to see another industrial-strength mash-up from the busy folks in Real Estate; January's School Search feature was their first. We hope to see many more in the future, from inside and outside the Yahoo! network. Please don't forget to let us know when you build something.
Kent Brewster, Yahoo! Developer Network
Posted by Kent Brewster at 10:05 AM | Comments (1)
We're hearing good reviews from Maker Faire. Here's a taste, gathered together from 62 clips all hosted on Jumpcut. If you'd like to mix 'em yourself, hit the big green candy-like Edit button and swing away:
About halfway in, after the "people making stuff" title, you'll see Josh and Tarikh from uncommonprojects, leading a Ybox workshop section. Something like 23,000 pictures are already online via Flickr, including a bunch of silly Polaroids generated by the team at the Yahoo! booth, scanned by the nice guys from Sharp, and instantly uploaded via the Flickr API.
Kent Brewster, Yahoo! Developer Network
Posted by Kent Brewster at 2:48 PM | Comments (0)
Q: What do catapults, 3-D printers, art cars, wooden bicycles, Extreme Knitting, Survival Research Laboratories, pinball machines, battling robots, homebrew tribbles, Steve Wozniak, power tool drag races, and the Tarantulas Jug Band all have in common?
A: They'll all be on hand this weekend at the San Mateo Expo Center, for the second installment of O'Reilly's Maker Faire. According to the organizers, Maker Faire is "a two-day, family-friendly event that celebrates arts, crafts, engineering, science projects and the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset. It's for creative, resourceful folks who like to tinker and love to make things. We call them Makers."
YDN will be there in spirit, powering the APIs behind the Ybox, which won second prize at our first open Hack Day, last September. Josh, Tarikh, and a crew of Yahoos with absolutely no fear of soldering irons will be on hand to help members of the Maker Faire audience build their very own Yboxen. (What's a Ybox? It's a tiny set-top box that fits in an Altoids tin, consumes Yahoo! APIs, and shows their output on your TV set, without the need for a computer.) Also wandering the grounds: the Blogging in Motion team, with a ruggedized version of their Hack Day winner that you might even get to take for a spin.
Pictures (and maybe video) to come ... see you at the Faire!
Kent Brewster, Yahoo! Developer Network
Posted by Kent Brewster at 9:34 AM | Comments (0)
The Konfabulator team at Yahoo! has built a vibrant developer community around their Widgets (you can find over 4,000 of them in the Widget gallery). We're big fans -- the winner of our first University Hack Day was a Widget developer (see "The Slide Rule Hack That Rules Them All") and the web service APIs and RSS feeds from Yahoo! Developer Network are perfect ingredients for building the Widget of your dreams.
The Konfabulator team is hosting a Developer Day on Thursday, June 7 -- see their blog post and the Upcoming event for all the details. This will be an intimate event with the Konfabulator team and a limited number of Widget developers (note: the only requirement to request a seat is that you've built a Widget and submitted it to the Widget gallery, though the Konfabulator team will pick the final list of attendees at their own discretion) .
Attendees will get free Widgets shwag and an inside look into:
For details on how to get a seat, visit the team's blog post about Konfabulator Developer Day. Come meet the Konfabulistas and help invent the future of Konfabulator!
Chad Dickerson
Yahoo! Developer Network
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 7:33 AM | Comments (1)
With apologies in advance to cat lovers (I have two cats!), it's hard to swing a dead cat on the Internet these days and not bump into someone using, talking about, or looking for YUI. YUI, in case you don't already know, is the Yahoo! User Interface library that's becoming an increasingly popular choice for building web sites with flexible and highly interactive interfaces.
Just last week I came across AJAX: Selecting the Framework that Fits in Dr. Dobb's Portal. In that article, Andrew Turner and Chao Wang compare and contrast several AJAX Frameworks.
Several AJAX frameworks were available, and we had to choose the appropriate one for our project—a process that required a significant amount of research and testing. For instance, our requirements included ongoing support for a variety of browsers and usability that had to be maintained.
We educated ourselves, examined several AJAX libraries, and performed browser and load testing throughout the project. The new AJAX-based retirement-plan website was deployed to production in mid-December 2006. To date, we've received excellent feedback, and we hope you benefit from the process we used to evaluate AJAX libraries and develop our first AJAX-enabled application.
With that introduction, they drill into three candidates (Dojo, Prototype, and YUI) and rank them on a variety of attributes. In the end they declared YUI the winner.
Our development team settled on the Yahoo! User Interface Library. And in the long run, our decision worked well for this and other projects.
We're especially impressed by how well YUI scored on Documentation, Download Size, and Ease of Maintenance.
If that wasn't enough, a little digging on some job sites has turned up several mentions of YUI in job listings. At last count we saw something like this:
No, I'm not hunting for a job. But hiring managers have apparently noticed that YUI developers are a pretty talented group.
Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Developer Network
Posted by jzawodn at 3:44 PM | Comments (2)
About a week ago, I wrote:
This post is already longer than I expected, so I'll hold off on posting my personal favorite pipe until tomorrow.
And then proceeded to leave you all hanging. Sorry about that.
Here's the lowdown on the coolest Pipe I've seen for a while now.
As a long-time Flickr user and an avid consumer of RSS feeds (thank you, Bloglines), I've easily had 20-30 Flickr generated RSS feeds in my subscription list. Being able to subscribe to people, groups, searches, and tags makes it easy to track a potentially large pool of photos without a lot of effort.
But there's always been one feature I wanted: the ability to get a feed of my friends' favorite photos. I'm fan of relying on the filtering of others' when it saves me time.
Well I just happened to come across this blog post which mentioned a Pipe called My flickr contacts' faves. Much to my surprise, it's pretty much exactly what I wanted.
Now I can easily see which photos my contacts are marking as favorites.
Check it out!
There's also a related discussion thread here in the Flickr Hacks group.
Oh, and in case it's not obvious, there's another reason I like this Pipe. It's an excellent example of how someone could effectively add a feature to one Yahoo! Product (Flickr) using another (Pipes) without ever having to even ask us for permission.
That's the power of Pipes combined with a good set of RSS feeds or simple APIs.
Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Developer Network
Posted by jzawodn at 12:46 PM | Comments (4)
I was very pleased to see the news about Yahoo!'s agreement to acquire Right Media:
"We see this as a key step in executing our long-term vision to build the industry’s leading advertising and publishing ecosystem -- both on and off Yahoo!’s network.Right Media employees, welcome to the Yahoo! family. We’re excited by your deep industry, technical, advertising and publisher knowledge, and look forward to working with a team of such high caliber and expertise."
I've been watching Right Media closely since Yahoo!'s initial investment back in October, as I became very interested in their approach to ad networks and the broad suite of openly available advertising service APIs. They have several very powerful web services including an ad campaign management tool, an insertion order web service, and a publisher management web service, just to name a few.
With all these tools available, you can imagine nearly limitless possibilities for building better advertising applications, mashups that make money and new ad-supported businesses that don't yet exist.
The Right Media folks are also big advocates and practitioners of open innovation. I've seen it first-hand, but you can also see the evidence on their blog. For example, one of the teams at their most recent Hack Day event built a plugin for Wordpress allowing you to manage inventory directly from your Wordpress admin panel:
"By adding this plugin to your WordPress blog (a popular, open source platform for blogging), you can quickly add ads to your blog posts. Being a member of Direct Media Exchange, you simply supply your login and password, then add ’simplified’ tags and they’ll show on your blog in between posts. Cool!Also included is light reporting within your WordPress ‘admin’ section."
We're very excited about the potential and hope to showcase some of the interesting ways people use Right Media's technologies here on YDN. If you've already built cool tools or business apps using Right Media, please let us know.
Matt McAlister
Posted by Matt McAlister at 8:41 AM | Comments (3)
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