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When you peel back the layers at Yahoo!, the core of innovation is usually a small group of people building something they think is really cool. That's what we want you to do at University Hack Day: grab our stuff and mash it up.
Here are the dates for the 2007 University Hack Day season:
We'll bring Maps, Search, Answers, Flickr, Music, del.icio.us, and all the rest of Yahoo's properties, documentation from the Yahoo! Developer Network, demonstrations from our very best engineers, loud music, all the food, drinks and Faceball you can handle, and 24 hours to make it happen.
Please visit the University Hack Day page for more details, including our 2006 overall winner, a recap of the open London Hack Day, and a brand-new How to Succeed at Hack Day list.
Kent Brewster, Yahoo! Developer Network
Posted by Kent Brewster at 1:25 PM | Comments (1)
Over on Coding Horror, Jeff Atwood writes YSlow: Yahoo's Problems Are Not Your Problems and makes some very good points about not taking YSlow results too literally--at least not without thinking about what you're doing.
But before you run off and implement all of Yahoo's solid advice, consider the audience. These are rules from Yahoo, which according to Alexa is one of the top three web properties in the world. And Rich's company, Topix, is no slouch either-- they're in the top 2,000. It's only natural that Rich would be keenly interested in Yahoo's advice on how to scale a website to millions of unique users per day.
That's good advice when it comes to following any set of recommendations. YSlow was designed for Yahoo's goals and will likely become more general over time. Take it's advice with a grain of salt, just like you should anyone's advice.
The comments on that post contain some useful nuggets as well, including some discussion from Steve Souders and the YSlow creators.
And, if you haven't already seen it, check out our Introducing YSlow screencast which was posted about here.
Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Developer Network
Posted by jzawodn at 7:36 AM | Comments (3)
Today, it's our pleasure to introduce Astra, a new open source library from Yahoo!'s Flash Platform team. 
In the spirit of our enormously popular YUI library, Astra is BSD licensed with full source for easy incorporation into your commercial applications. Astra is high-quality ActionScript 3 code with both examples and documentation provided. While this first release of Astra contains only a small number of components, the Flash team at Yahoo! is committed to expanding the number of components and energizing developers around Flash application development. Download Astra from our Flash developer center and then watch some screencasts to get started (charts - Quicktime or Windows Media) (autocomplete and tabbar - Quicktime or Windows Media)
Posted by at 1:25 PM | Comments (5)
It's always fun to see what people will do with the tools we release. Sometimes they use them in "interesting" ways. Or, in this case, they're used to come to an amusing conclusion. That's exactly what you'll find in Web 2 Point Slow - Slowcial Communities:
These descriptive statistical data show that successful Web 2.0 communities are pretty slow. This is not necessarily a problem of slow Web servers or Internet connections, but of the amount of data, the number of HTTP requests, too much JavaScript, Flash, images and other media, HTML structure and the time it takes for the browser to render the pages.
Here's the chart:
Luckily, we're not in that slow group. As Ramiro notes "4 sites stand out: yahoo.com and craiglist.org with a grade higher than 90..."
Excellent. :-)
I'm sure this isn't the first time someone will use YSlow to rank some of their favorite sites. Maybe some of those sites will implement of few of our Exceptional Performance Best Practices to speed things up. :-)
Have you seen any particularly surprising results from YSlow so far? Let us know.
Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Developer Network
Posted by jzawodn at 4:04 PM | Comments (3)
Yahoo! Pipes pushed three new modules live today. The Yahoo! Shortcuts module analyzes an input string for popular entities, such as person, place, and concept, and will return additional information about each entity found. The Term Extractor module analyzes an input string for significant words or phrases and appends them as a sub-element under each item containing the results of the analysis. Finally, the The Web Service module does an HTTP POST of items in a pipe in JSON format to an external web service of your choosing. Read more details and try examples of the Shortcuts and Term Extraction modules here. Read about the Web Service module here.
Jason Levitt
Posted by at 2:36 PM | Comments (0)
In a new how-to, developer Niall Kennedy shows you how to add the new YUI RTE (rich text editor) control to your blog so that your visitors can easily make comments using HTML tags. He points out that since he already knew the YUI library, deploying RTE was "easier than starting over again with something new," and he could re-use the loaded YUI base libraries "for other future features." Need more reasons to deploy RTE? Read Dave Glas' YUI blog post for some RTE past and future as well as ruminations on Safari 2 support.
Jason Levitt
Posted by at 12:34 PM | Comments (0)
Our Bangalore engineering team has given us a few precious cycles of their time to add the most requested feature to YDN's directory of mashups, gallery.yahoo.com. Gallery submissions can now be submitted under multiple API categories. So, if your mashup uses, say, both the Flickr and Search APIs, you can have it included in both categories so that it is easier to find. Other new changes include a category for recent acquisition Right Media and the removal of the Yahoo! Photos category (all Photos mashups were moved to the Misc category).
Jason Levitt
Posted by at 9:40 AM | Comments (0)
If you're an Excel power user with a stack of addresses you'd like to geocode, look no farther than Jon Udell's Excel geocoding adventures to learn how.
I’ve been working with a spreadsheet containing addresses that want to be geocoded. I’ve had lots of experience running batches of addresses through geocoding services, but in the case of the police department I’ve been working with, it would be nice to be able to do the geocoding interactively.
In his signature style, Jon lays out the problem, walks through his thinking, illustrates the solution, and even provides example code.
All in all, it was an educational exercise. The patterns here can serve as a model for any scenario that involves interactively querying a web service based on some cell in Excel, and then incorporating the results into companion cells. Of course since I’m a complete novice when it comes to this stuff, I’m hoping that by posting my code I’ll also find out about other and better approaches.
Good to see our geocoder being put to good use.
Have you come up with a cool way of using it? If so, let us know...
Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Developer Network
Posted by jzawodn at 12:18 PM | Comments (0)
This Tuesday I had the distinct privilege of facilitating a group of five young women as they built out a Web page detailing their experiences that day on Yahoo's Sunnyvale campus.
The participants came to us courtesy of the Santa Clara region of the Society of Women Engineers, which sponsors GetSET (SET = Science, Engineering, Technology). GetSET is a four-year mentoring program that reaches out to girls in high school who are from groups typically under-represented in engineering and computer science.
As part of their GetSET Summer Week, students spent the day touring our facilities, participating in panel discussions, and documenting what they saw, heard, and felt. At the end of the day they had two hours to come up with a Web page that described their experiences.
My group took photos and used simple tools--TextPad, Microsoft Paint, stone knives, and bear skins--to build out a highly effective page, using YUI's Font, CSS, Reset, and Grids technologies. Other groups created Maps, Flickr, and Video mash-ups. At the end of the day, everybody stood up and presented their work to the applause of their mentors and peers, Hack Day style.
There are times when it's tempting to throw up one's hands in despair and just give up hope. (Here's a chilling thought: the MySpace/YouTube generation will be choosing your retirement home.) After Tuesday, however, I'm pleased to report that at least one tiny corner of the future is in very good hands.
Kent Brewster, Yahoo! Developer Network
Posted by Kent Brewster at 11:18 AM | Comments (0)
During the week of the YSlow release, Dan Theurer and I sat down with Steve Souders (Chief Performance Yahoo) to discuss web site performance and YSlow.
The result of that conversation (and some Camtasia learning on my part) is an audio interview and a video demo for your listening and viewing pleasure.
The 8:51 audio recording (8MB MP3) captures the background discussion, including the need for YSlow, how it came to be, performance best practices, FireBug integration, and so on.
The 8:22 video screencast is a continuation of the discussion where we run YSlow against www.yahoo.com to get an idea of how YSlow works. You can jump right in and watch the video (QuickTime or on-line via JumpCut) without listening to the podcast, but you'll miss a few references from earlier in the discussion.
We also "filmed" two other demos: one using my blog (it gets a "D") and another using the YDN web site (it doesn't score well either). Look for those to appear soon.
Enjoy...
Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Developer Network
Posted by jzawodn at 10:57 AM | Comments (5)
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