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Kai Hansen, Tony Ralph, Eric Goldsmith, and Artur Bergman during, This is Your Page with Ads, a panel moderated by Steve Souders.
It turns out I’m not the only person who thinks micro-optimization of CSS files is cool. I learned this lesson a year ago when I joined the Exceptional Performance team at Yahoo! and had it reinforced by the quality of both the presentations and the hallway conversations at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference last week.
Attending Velocity Con was fabulous. I was especially impressed that the sessions on web performance were packed. There were a ton of Yahoos at the conference, Julien Lecomte from Yahoo! Search spoke about “High-performance Ajax Applications”.
“In the past few years, Ajax has become very popular because it has enabled developers to build more complex web applications. However, in the rush to push the browser to new limits, we have created a monster. “ – Julien
Julien suggested several detailed strategies and patterns that developers can use to accelerate their applications. Stoyan Stefanov, the lead developer of YSlow, and my colleague in the Exceptional Performance team, spoke about Image Optimization, including the 7 mistakes most sites are making. He showed non-designers how to automate image optimization and reduce image bloat by as much as 30%. After attending the talk, Douglas Crockford shared some love.
“It is good to be able to point with pride at something that Yahoo does that is extremely smart. The Exceptional Performance Team is one of the things that makes me proud to be at Yahoo.” – Doug
John Allspaw from Flickr joined a panel about Surviving Success by preparing to be TechCrunched, Dugg, Slashdotted, or even “Oprahed”. He also presented Capacity Management.
“Your process of capacity planning should be adaptive, adjustable, and include more than just system statistics. Measurement, architecture, and economics are all equally important to having your site perform. Becoming popular doesn’t have to mean being afraid your site will fall over from too much load.” – John
Adam Bechtel, the chief architect covering network, storage and systems infrastructure at Yahoo! presented “Performance Plumbing”. He believes that scale provides unique opportunities to leverage the network to improve performance.
“As your site scales, don’t overlook the performance opportunities that the plumbing creates.” – Adam
Tony Ralph who works on ad quality and performance for Yahoo! participated in a panel, This is Your Page with Ads. He made an important point that I hadn’t really thought of before. He indicated that the ad industry and engineers measure performance in very different ways; one via monetization, the other via impact on response time. He emphaiszed how important it is for engineers to understand both points of view, so that we can effectively measure and convey the impact of end user experience on revenue.
Kai Hansen from Google Ireland also mentioned the need to properly advocate this point of view from within our companies so that quality metrics such as keyword relevance and performance are tied to the cost of displaying ads.
I look forward to Velocity Conference 2009. I do hope that it will focus on the front end with more talks about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Ajax. These sessions were the most popular of the conference, and front-end performance is still in its infancy. Douglas Crockford expressed it very well.
“By showing the browser makers how web applications actually perform, the browser makers are now able to make effective changes to the platform. As the platform evolves, we will need new rules and new tools. There is still much to do. (Emphasis mine)” – Doug
Exceptional Performance Yahoo!
Posted at 7:06 AM | Comments (2)
This Wednesday, Yahoo!'s London-based SearchMonkeys hosted a evening to show the developer community just how ridiculously easy it is to build enhancements to their Yahoo! Search results using Search Monkey. Even though we were up against one of Radiohead's concerts, and a Girl Geek Dinner, some fifty people came along to monkey around with us in the loft space of a lovely rambling building just off Covent Garden in London.
We were lucky to have Paul Tarjan, the Chief Technical Monkey from America along to give an overview of the inner workings of SearchMonkey. This was followed by Neil Crosby (that's me!) giving a live demo to show just how simple SearchMonkey makes enhancing your search results. Thankfully, the Internet stayed up, and the demos went without a hitch.
After the talks, the floor was opened for questions, and then people got down to the important task of eating pizza and making monkeys. Walking around the room, it was clear that people had interesting ideas about things they could make. I look forward to seeing them shared in the gallery soon.
The one recurring question I was asked during the evening was, "Are your slides available?" The good news is they're now up on Slideshare, and they walk through the process of creating a couple simple monkeys as I did for our live audience.
All in all, a good time was had. We gave out a whole bunch of toy monkeys that make a ridiculous amount of noise as they fly through the air (sorry if they've shown up in your office), as well as a bunch of hats and stickers to remember us by. The biggest takeaway of all: Enhancing your search results is really easy with SearchMonkey.
We're planning more of these developer evenings in London over the coming months, so keep an eye on the YDN blog and come along to the next one!
Neil Crosby
Engineer, Yahoo London
Posted at 10:53 AM | Comments (1)
A lot has changed since the first publication of High Performance MySQL in 2004. At some point, the web turned 2.0, startups became cool again, and SQL became a bad word (regardless of how you pronounce it). For many in this new generation of web development, hand-writing SQL has become a sort of vestige--something to suffer through only as a last resort. Frameworks like Django and Ruby on Rails provide a clean abstraction to the database called an ORM, or Object-Relational Mapping, which makes it possible to develop an entire application without writing a single line of SQL. Developers end up learning the hard way that reliance on database-agnostic development can have tremendous consequences once the application has to scale to thousands or millions of users.
High Performance MySQL, by Baron Schwartz, Peter Zaitsev, Vadim Tkachenko, Jeremy Zawodny, Arjen Lentz, and Derek J. Balling, is a high-level introduction to the most powerful aspects of MySQL that's still accessible to anyone who's worked with a database before. Although this book focuses on MySQL, many of the concepts like transactions, locking, and query optimization are important to an understanding of any database system. You can get through the book on just a basic literacy of SQL, but it might be helpful to have a companion reference lying around in case something comes up.
The book starts out with a detailed overview of the MySQL architecture, with careful attention to MySQL's selection of storage engines, which offers a lot of flexibility in how you can optimize performance. As a way to explain the differences between each of these storage engines and when it might make sense to use InnoDB rather than MyISAM, for instance, the book provides a thorough explanation of how they implement locking and transactions.
Chapters 3 & 4 are also fairly specific to MySQL, as they explain the finer details of how it processes queries. MySQL does a fair amount of heuristics-based optimization on incoming queries depending on the nature of your data, and understanding what's going on under the hood can not only help you fix queries, but start writing better SQL. If you've ever added column indices because it seemed like the cool thing to do, or couldn't quite figure out how that simple query could be taking a few seconds, these two chapters especially will set you straight.
The rest of the book covers general best practices for optimizing server performance. These chapters provide a good reference for how MySQL best implements practices like benchmarking, load balancing, backups, and hardware scaling. Since most of these optimizations are external to MySQL itself, much of the information is important for any production environment.
Without a doubt, High Performance MySQL belongs on any serious developer's bookshelf. Like the original, it's an enjoyable, engaging read that provides battled-tested solutions to real-world problems that engineers face in scaling their applications. The second edition covers the new features of MySQL 5, including stored procedures, cursors, triggers and views, as well as a deeper comparative look into the various storage engines. Perhaps more importantly, the second edition brings with it a reminder of how important database design is to web development.
Mattt Thompson
Technology Evangelist Intern
This review is especially timely, as yesterday was Jeremy Zawodny's last day at Yahoo!. Jeremy hired me on as an intern this summer, and I've had the pleasure of working with him over the past few weeks. Anyway, I thought this would be a cool way to send him off. From all of us at the YDN, we wish you the best.
Posted at 9:01 AM | Comments (2)
I got to spend last Wednesday hob-nobbing with 250 social media and community nerds at the second Online Community UnConference held at the Computer Science Museum in Mountain View. The people involved in community management tend to be uber social, and just as it seems, they love to talk. In fact, the board filled up with sessions in minutes. I've never been to an unconference that filled up the session board that fast!
Yahoo! was well represented, with a number of current community managers and alumni. Heather Champ, Community Manager of Flickr and Derek Powazek from Fray spoke about the bad times all communities cycle through. Their topic, "Worst Case Scenarios: What To Do When Things Go Terribly Wrong", was a great reminder. When you think of community management, especially in the beginning, it seems all beer and roses (I hate wine). I don't think many of us think of the bad until it happens. Things can and often do go wrong in this sector, and getting blindsided is never fun.
Tilly, the new CM (community manager) from MyBlogLog, and I made the rounds and were able to hit quite a few sessions, but most interesting to me were the ones on metrics/ROI. I don't think anyone has figured out the metrics of success for online communities yet, but I did gain a great deal of insight from several clueful people in the off-time after lunch.
Photo credit Duzins
I couldn't help but notice how many available jobs there were on the shout-out board. Community is hot!
Photo credit Duzins
Noted online community pioneer Randy Farmer did a session and he also gave props to the reputation patterns from the Design Patterns Library, found on YDN. Thanks Randy!
Photo credit Duzins
All in all, a great day. Sadly, the tchotchke I purchased at the Computer Science Museum died yesterday. I can't complain I guess, as it was only $3. Nonetheless, I remain despondent.
Robyn Tippins
Community Manager, YDN
Posted at 2:59 PM | Comments (0)
I'd like to share some highlights from the two-day Search Engine Strategies 2008 Toronto Conference & Expo that took place last week. I was delighted by the opportunity to give a talk on "Web 2.0 and Search Engines." My audience consisted of search engine marketers, sales, strategist, consultants, and engineers. The participants had a common goal: how to maximize search engine optimization -- for themselves and/or their clients.
Day 1: The keynote delivered by Fredrick Marckini was excellent, with many useful learnings. I also attended a great session called "Universal and Blended Search" session. Key takeaway here for me: Because users spend more time viewing images and video nowadays, SEO involves more than just text and links on the page.
The "Getting Found in Maps & Local Search" session offered useful information. The materials were not new to me, but that's probably because I'm a local search engineer. The session on "Twitter: Ultimate Time Waster, or Great Tool" was quite interesting. I didn't expect much from this session because I hadn't twittered before. After the session I started twittering.
The SES party sponsored by Yahoo! was great. Unfortunately, I couldn't party all night long because I needed to tweak my presentation and tune it for the SES audience. That's the advantage of presenting on Day 2 of a conference. Let's face it, as a speaker, you can't please everyone, but at least you can try to keep the audience awake. If you can't do that -- go take a Toastmasters course!
Day 2: I hid myself in a conference room to rehearse my presentation, which focused on Web 2.0, and how Yahoo! leverages microformats and semantic markup to enable SearchMonkey. With SearchMonkey and the semantic web, site owners can differentiate themselves from their competitors by creating their own blended search experience and unique presentation. Site owners can (theoretically) redefine the search result page heatmap. The customized search result and informative presentation will attract the users' focus to the publisher's listing. So the conventional wisdom of heatmap and golden triangle are outdated. SearchMonkey creates new opportunities for search marketers. SEO is not longer just about links, metadata, h1s, keywords, and text. It's about creating efficient access to information by recognizing the context of the data. Content alone is NOT King. Content without context is like a life without purpose.
My message to the audience was: Give meaning to your data with SearchMonkey's semantic markup --then you'll be ahead of the curve. Happy SEOing!
Ambles Kwok
Technical Yahoo!
Yahoo! Canada
Posted at 8:55 AM | Comments (1)
The well-known travel guide "Lonely Planet" are yet another company to join the ranks of those offering their content to developers with APIs. I managed to get hold of Chris Boden, who runs Wireless and Innovation at Lonely Planet during the mashed08 hack event in London this weekend and asked him a few questions about this new developer offering.
YDN: So Chris, you came all the way from Australia to attend Mashed08 in
London. What was the main driver?
We've been preparing to launch our developer program and thought that Mashed08 would be a great event to do that at, especially seeing as though Lonely Planet is now part of the BBC Worldwide family.
YDN: What can developers get from the Lonely Planet in terms of data?
We're giving developers at Mashed 08 access to some of our destination content, including geocoded points of interest reviews, destination profiles, traveller-created "best of" lists and travel photographs from our Lonely Planet images library.
YDN: What formats do you support? What is the authentication model?
We're releasing a set of REST API's which developers can access with an API key. We're supporting XML and a range of microformats including hReview, hCard, georss and vCard.
YDN: Is there a chance for a JavaScript API? Think about badges, widgets and so on. For now, people could use Pipes to work around that, but it is becoming something of a standard.
We don't have any badges available right now but would certainly like to provide those as part of a broader release of our API's in the next few months.
YDN: Are there limits to the API? How do you keep the server hits in
check?
Yes, there is a monthly transaction limit corresponding with each API key and we're keeping an eye on utilization and listening to feedback to make sure we've pegged the limits at the right level. We're using a service provided by Mashery to manage developer access to our API's.
YDN: One of the most important things when releasing new APIs is documentation and support. What kind of documentation do you offer and how big is the support team?
We've launched a new developer portal at developer.lonelyplanet.com which is where developers can register and get access to documentation.
Each of the API methods are documented with sample inputs and outputs and to get people started, we've opened-sourced code from our mobile site m.lonelyplanet.com which is an example of a mashup which uses our API's.
We have a small team based in Australia supporting the API's, with developers supporting technical issues and a developer liaison handling general queries, registration support and hosting the conversation on the blog, wiki, etc.
Let's take a peek under the hood. What do you run as your own systems (language,CMS) and how big is the lonely planet dev team?
We're running a LAMP stack with a Drupal CMS at the back end and most of the code is written in PHP.
Where do you see the benefit in releasing an API? How do you plan to monetize it or is it a loss-leader for you?
We don't have a funky web app like Twitter or Dopplr at this stage but we do have content - in a sense, that content is our platform. We want to take the Lonely Planet content and community experience onto relevant new platforms and make it accessible to travellers in new ways. We're not going to be able to do all of that on our own so we're looking to tap into external sources of innovation and creativity through open collaboration to help us imagine and execute the next generation of services that might enrich the lives of our community.
In terms of monetization, we'll look to work commercially with those developers who come up with innovations that we believe have the potential to create commercial value.
What are you doing in terms of distribution? Of course people can build anything they want with an API, but a lot of people also want easy-to-install badges and apps for networks like Facebook?
We've got a fair bit more work to do in this area - we need to build stronger contextual linkage from the content in our API's back to lonelyplanet.com and our other digital properties, then we can enable simpler distribution via things like widgets and badges.
I signed up for the developer API and found the process a bit daunting (too many steps). Who can I talk to about these kind of problems? Is there any official user testing?
Yes, we've had some feedback on the registration process which we'll learn from - we needed a 2 step process because we wanted to verify that developers were attendees at Mashed 08 where we launched in private beta. I've passed your feedback onto our developer liaison, thanks for that.
What is the authentication model? Are you thinking of supporting oAuth and openID?
The API's we've released are read-only at this stage and the authentication uses API keys. As we move to opening up some of our read/write API's we'll look at some of the open protocols like oAuth to handle authentication.
Will there be more competitions? Maybe an online one so anyone world-wide is able to participate?
Yes, we will be having more competitions in the future - we have some universities with great technology faculties in our home town of Melbourne so it would be nice to do something there next and then maybe world-wide competition when we're ready for it.
Last but not least, what did you see so far here being hacked with your APIs and are you happy with the outcome?
We've seen some very cool hacks with our API's today, with some pretty innovative concepts. The one I found most interesting was a location-based application which provided a set of recommendations based on your current location, mashing together the Fireagle API for managing your location and our geocoded points of interest and then triggering a message to your phone when you're nearby to something that Lonely Planet recommends. So, yes, we're very pleased with the outcome of the event and the amount of participation from the Mashed community.
Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network
Posted at 11:34 AM | Comments (0)
Yesterday I flew 4 hours to Ankara, Turkey to give a presentation at the Open Source conference held in the Tobb Etü university for economics and technology. For YDN, this was a very special event as it was the introduction of our new man on the ground in Turkey - Volkan Bicer.
Now it is one day later, two hours after my presentation, and I am sitting in the Ankara Airport to catch my flight to Istanbul from where I'll go back home after another three hour stop-over. Somehow this feels surreal.
The conference revolved all around Open source solutions and what they can do for developers and to drive the IT market in Turkey. Speakers involved people sent by JBOSS, IBM, OpenOffice and Novell and I faced a massive lecture hall filled with around 80 people eager to hear about what Yahoo can bring to the table.
My presentation revolved both around the free offers Yahoo has for developers and introducing Volkan as the first point of call for anything Yahoo/Developer related in Turkey. Judging the first reactions from the audience I gathered that I showed them a lot of useful things new to them and that they are very eager to read more - hence the immediate posting here.
Sadly enough the T-Shirts we got for the students are still held in customs in Istanbul, which means that I had to improvise and created a prize-draw with free copies of my book for the winners. If you are to travel to Istanbul soon and you see customs officers with Yahoo hack T-Shirts, please take photos and upload them on Flickr. Talking of which, Volkan did a great job taking lots of photos of the event and my talk soon available on my Flickr stream.
All in all I had a great time and seeing Volkan immersed in talks with students and professors asking us about the Uni Hack Day program gives me a good feeling about this and we're sure to return sooner or later for a longer period.
I hope the rest of the conference will be as successful and I'll badger Volkan to give details later on. For now, we are very happy with the outcome and that "nobody left the saloon" (as Volkan put it - salon(u) is Turkish for "hall") during our presentation. I tip my hat, mount my winged horse and ride back into the wild wild west of North East London. Maybe I'll get a Borek when I get there.
Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network
Posted at 6:58 AM | Comments (0)
Photo credit goosemurf
Yahoo!7 hosted a Girl Geek dinner in their Sydney, Australia office last week. The audience was a rich mix of people, from tech writers and marketers to developers, sys admins, and researchers. We saw girl geeks from companies like Atlassian, Thoughtworks, and Google, and from groups like Linuxchix. We were genuinely thrilled to have a chance to hobnob with other female geeks.
Sara Falamaki
Photo credit claudpix
Sara Falamaki spoke about happy code for happy programmers. Everyone seemed uber appreciative of Sara’s insight. Pratibha and I spoke on YUI, Open ID, Yahoo APIs, and all that Yahoo! has to offer to the developer community.
Pratibha Gannavarapu and Claudia Jayne Mikaelian
Photo credit Damana via claudpix
The dinner was a complete success and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. We hope to see other Yahoo! offices sponsoring Geek Girl dinners in the future.
Claudia Jayne Mikaelian
Desktop Support Engineer
Posted at 5:40 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Just in time for the Firefox 3 Download Day (today, June 17th), last night we released a new version of YSlow that works with Firefox 3. You can install it from the YSlow page or the Mozilla add-ons site.
What's new in this version:
In this version, as with the previous one, we aimed at supporting all possible combinations of the different Firefox and Firebug development branches, namely the latest Firefox 2 and 3 and the latest Firebug releases: 1.05 (stable), 1.1 (beta) and 1.2 (beta).
Many thanks to everybody who sent kind words of encouragement and questions about the availability of this new release, sorry we didn't reply to all of you, but now your wait is over.
As always, your feedback is welcome and appreciated, feel free to use the contact form or join the exceptional-performance mailing list.
Happy download day!
Stoyan Stefanov
Exceptional Performance
Posted at 2:05 PM | Comments (0)
Editor's note: This post was originally published on hueniverse: thoughts on technology & open standards.
Everyone is talking about Open these days, and it is a very exciting kind of Open. It is the Open that allows developers to utilize the best resources available online and combine them into new and innovative products and experiences. The internet has always maintained a healthy balance allowing users to pick and choose the individual services that suit their needs. What this new Open adds, is the ability to allow new providers to build on top of the existing layer and improve it, rather than have to start from scratch. It also enables users to get more out of their existing online presence, making their digital assets do more for them.
OAuth, an community-driven open standard was designed to address sharing of resources between services while maintaining full user ownership and privacy. We are all too accustomed by now to being asked for our username and password when joining a new service in order to import our existing data. The obvious problem is that the credentials we are asked to share control more than just our address book, photos, or bookmarks – they often control our electronic wallet, confidential correspondence, financial and medical records, and other sensitive data. To make things worse, sharing our email username and password means granting full access to almost everything we do online on other sites since email is the most common way to change and recover passwords.
After many one-off attempts at solving this problem, the community came together last year and created OAuth, an open standard for delegated authority. The specification has been gaining support from small and large providers and is becoming an important building block for new and existing web services. Yahoo! Recently announced its upcoming support for it as an important building block of the Yahoo! Open Strategy.
With more companies implement OAuth and more developers get to interact with resources secured by it, we are starting to see new patterns and needs for moving OAuth forward. With that in mind Yahoo! is excited to host the first OAuth Summit. The event will take place June 26th at Yahoo!’s Santa Clara, CA campus and will include many of the OAuth community leaders – both individuals and companies. The event will focus on moving the specification forward and is expected to be highly technical. Participants are expected to have a solid understanding of the protocol in order to maximize our time together.
To learn more about OAuth, please visit the OAuth Community site. For information about the Summit and to register please visit the event wiki page. If you blog about the event, please use the ‘oauthsummit2008’ tag.
Hope to see you there!
Eran Hammer-Lahav
Open Standards Evangelist
Posted at 2:13 PM | Comments (0)
I've spent some of my evenings lately to build accessible alternative interfaces to successful social networks and "Web 2.0" sites. I've taken on feedback from disabled users and agencies that work with people with varying disabilities. The first was an easier interface to YouTube and now I tackled Flickr and cut it down to the bear necessities.
As several people asked how I did the Flickr interface, I wrote up some step-by-step instructions, analyzing the issues and then taking the API to work around them.
Check out How to create an alternative Flickr interface - step by step.
This is one example where providing a good API can empower developers to remove barriers you might not be aware of for you. I hope to be able to show you more of those in the future - if there is interest.
The code examples are available and are licensed with BSD, so feel free to re-use them.
Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network
Posted at 2:59 AM | Comments (0)
The SearchMonkey team is inviting a whole lot of developers throughout (well northwest) Europe to come and meet SearchMonkey experts, have a drink and some food and show and tell us what they could use SearchMonkey for.
Three locations in parallel will be monkeyed up:
So what are you waiting for? Go sign up and we'll see each other there next Wednesday!
Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network
Posted at 2:04 AM | Comments (0)
First off, a confession--I've rewritten the first sentence of this post maybe a dozen times. (How's that for meta?) For one reason or another, I figured that writing about JavaScript would warrant some clever insight into the language. Some poetic tidbit that people could rally behind. The kind of voice that could shape a generation of empathetic web developers.
Something like:
Javascript is a language of alchemy, turning inconsistent behavior and design flaws into Web 2.0 gold.
Or maybe:
JavaScript is nothing short of quantum physics with its spooky action at a distance.
Before I decided to go all self-referential with my introduction, I had tentatively settled on something I think we can all agree with:
JavaScript is really, really weird.
As weird as it is, there are a lot of good reasons to actually learn JavaScript, and not just pretend it's some other language with C syntax. It takes a great deal of insight into this language to understand its true potential, and Douglas Crockford offers just this in his new book, "Javascript: The Good Parts." This offering from O'Reilly and Yahoo! sets itself apart from other JavaScript books in a lot of ways.
The first thing you'll notice is how thin this book is. Weighing in at around 100 pages and another 50 with appendices, it's a concise and remarkably pleasant read that you'll probably finish in a single sitting. Nonetheless, there is enough packed into this book to have you reading it through a few more times. Another rarity among programming books is its remarkable clarity and pleasant, patient tone. That said, this book is not for beginners (JavaScript probably isn't a great language to learn programming with anyway). By tailoring the book to people already familiar with programming fundamentals, Crockford is able to tease out the quirks that make JavaScript so confusing, and expose some of its hidden elegance.
The best parts of "The Good Parts" are definitely Chapters 4 and 5, which take a look at some of JavaScript's more unique aspect--functions as objects and prototypes. In Chapter 4, Crockford explains and implements an impressive set of language features like modules, function currying, and memoization, which make JavaScript start to feel closer to languages like Python, Haskell, or Lisp. Chapter 5 does a great job explaining the difference between classical and prototypical inheritance, and how to take advantage of prototypes in JavaScript.
If you're a developer looking to finally make sense of JavaScript, you'll find this book to be right up your alley. It's an enjoyable read that presents core programming concepts and won't waste your time on the marketing buzzwords that usually come with the territory. Do yourself a favor and check out Douglas Crockford's Javascript: The Good Parts, and forget everything you ever thought about this poor, misunderstood language.
Mattt Thompson
Yahoo! Developer Network
Posted at 4:06 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Nate Koechley, Senior Frontend Engineer at Yahoo, gave the keynote presentation at the second day of this year's @media conference in London, UK. He just released the slides of the talk.
In his own words:
Over the last three or four years the role of Frontend Engineering has become more important, more respected, more challenging, and more in-demand than ever before, and so I wanted to put a stake in the ground clarifying what we do, how we do it, and why it’s so important to raise it to a professional level.
Nate and I are planning to continue to advocate this school of thinking - it is time the frontend developer job becomes more obvious as a specialist skill. One of the ways you can support the cause is to vote for his panel proposal on professional frontend engineering for SXSW next year.
Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network
Posted at 6:36 AM | Comments (2)
Last Tuesday Yahoo! joined the Asia Pacific Web Technology Conference held in The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. We had a chance to host a session in the conference to introduce technologies in YDN, including common APIs, Yahoo! Pipes, SearchMonkey and also YUI Library. The attendees were very interested in our latest technologies, especially SearchMonkey, which they can't wait to start developing their own applications for. Hopefully we will see more submissions to the SearchMonkey gallery from the local developer communities and help to enhance local searchers' user experience.
Terence Yim
Technical Yahoo! Team Lead - Hong Kong
Posted at 3:01 AM | Comments (0)
Here is a screencast showing how to make a "data triggered" plugin. It won't show the normal "Load Error" or "Enhancement Failed" for results that don't have the data. Remember, this technique only works on prexisting data, and not data services, so go mark-up your pages! :)
On Yahoo Video: http://video.yahoo.com/watch/2827476/8201306
Module (so you can clone it if somehow the gallery clone doesn't work) : SearchMonkey-YDirectory.txt
Gallery (so you can use it, and clone it) : Y!Directory in Gallery
Posted at 12:28 PM | Comments (3)
On Wednesday night we announced that the Search Gallery, which had previously been open to developers, is now available to users. You will now notice a “Customize” drop down menu in the header of the search results pages. From there, users can browse applications and add those they find useful.
There are already a bunch of great applications in the Gallery, and a number of our partners have blogged about their apps. Here’s a few examples:
last.fm built a great app for music searching, and they blogged about the process here.
LinkedIn blogged about their app, which includes profile photos and details.
Trulia’s blog discusses their app, which includes photos and links to related sections of their site.
Thanks again to everyone who’s built SearchMonkey apps (and blogged about it!). Don't forget to enter your apps in the SearchMonkey Developer Challenge!
Graham Mudd
Posted at 9:41 AM | Comments (0)
Recently we added two new requirements for gallery apps. If you have apps in the gallery (or are submitting new ones), please check that the apps meet these guidelines:
getOutput() method, so we default to the simple search result.
And for other requirements please refer to our previous blog post here.
Lawrence Kim
Yahoo! Search
Posted at 2:34 PM | Comments (0)
Lately there's been quite a few changes in "old school" media, with radio stations and TV channels starting developer programs. The newest wave seems to be newspapers embracing the new media to a fuller extend with the Guardian in the UK ramping up their development program and going out to speak about their learnings from redesigning their portal at developer conferences.
One piece of news that shook the blogosphere is that the New York Times is planning to give access to their wealth of information via APIs in the sooner future. I managed to get hold of Marc Frons, CTO of the The York Times Digital Operations to get some more details.
YDN: Hello Marc. There was a bit of buzz about the NYT releasing an API already on the readwriteweb.com but we're still craving for more details. What's cooking and how come you chose to go down the API route?
MF: This is all part of our strategy to open the New York Times as much as possible to leverage the creativity of our readers and the development community. Our goal is to disseminate our news and information as widely as possible and make it as useful as possible.
YDN: That means that you will make the content available for consumption and remixing. In terms of "creativity of users", will there be more user generated content on the site, too?
MF: We will definitely be adding more user generated content. I can't be more specific than that right now.
YDN: Will the content of the NYT and the order be influenced by the API use and user creativity? Is this the start of Digg-NYT?
MF: Our editors will still decide what to cover and how to present it on our pages. That is, after all, a big reason people come to NYTimes.com -- to see what the editors of the New York Times think is important. But we're also interested in giving our readers alternative views and having them share their activities on our site. We'll be releasing some new features around sharing news and information very soon.
YDN: With thousands of mashup-hungry developers out there, how much are you planning to make publicly available?
MF: Over time, all of our freely available news and information will be exposed to some degree in APIs. We will of course have terms of use and certain restrictions that will be spelled out in our license agreements.
YDN: What formats are you likely to support? Yahoo so far has been quite successful by providing data in various formats (XML,RSS,serialized PHP,JSON). Are you going that far, too?
MF: Yes, all of the above.
YDN: Great. What about access? Are you planning to have developer keys and if so did you choose any authentication system? Any support for OpenID or oAuth, perchance?
MF: We are planning developer keys but are still in the process of deciding whether to go Open ID or not.
YDN: How are you planning to deal with the amount of traffic that is very likely to be caused by the API access points. Is there a limitation per requests or are you thinking of monetization plans? If so, which?
MF: We'll impose some limits on the number of requests to a given service within a certain period. There may be a licensing model for commercial use but in general we plan to monetize these through increased traffic back to our site, not through licensing fees.
YDN: That is a bit of a crunch though, as using an API as an implementer to me means not having to send users over to the site it came from. Are you thinking of a Flickr-style agreement where you have to link back to the NYT, or does this entice more rigorous measures like only allowing for excerpts and asking users to click through to the full version?
MF: We don't envision exposing a full feed of all of our content that would give users no reason to return to NYTimes.com. But there will be different levels for different types of content. This is obviously a new area for us and we're going to learn and make adjustments as we go along to try to strike the right balance.
YDN: One of the features I am always sorely missing are read/write APIs. Are you planning to give developers write access? After all, this is a great way of piggy-backing on the success and relevance of other sites and applications.
MF: THe first APIs will be read-only. We're studying read/write and may experiment with that in the future, but I don't think it will be anything we will do this year.
YDN: Understandable, it is quite a moderation overhead. Talking of moderation, you already spoke about limits of access for a certain time. Are you going to track the use of the APIs and maybe offer implementers statistics?
MF: Yes, we'll definitely track usage. We haven't decided how much we'll make public yet.
YDN: How big is the team supporting the API initiative, and what kind of people are in the team?
MF: All I can say is this is a significant effort for us with many developers involved.
YDN: Are you planning to start a developer network to go along with the APIs?
MF: We would like to, yes, but our plan is to release a series of these APIs first and learn from the developer community before we formally establish a network.
YDN: What are the plans in terms of documentation?
MF: We'll have documentation for all the APIs and an area on our site where developers can discuss and ask questions.
YDN: We found that giving developers a place to help each other immensely successful, and saving us time in the long run. Are there
going to be open forums or a Wiki?
MF: Yes, there will definitely be an area on the site for developers to ask questions, and exchange ideas.
YDN: Will there be any events to go along with the release?
MF: We're planning a "hack day" at our new headquarters in New York for later this year or early next. We're working on firming up a date now, and should be announcing that in a few weeks.
YDN: Great! Will this be an open event or are you going to cherry-pick the attendees? Are there any pre-release invites planned? I always found that getting some people in early to have something to show helps a lot when going live and outside help sees things a lot different than when you try to make up examples yourself.
MF: Yes, we want to get some folks in early -- you'll definitely be on the list. But this is just coming together now. I think, just because of the physical limitations of the space, we'll limit attendance to no more than 300 people. But it will also be open to anyone who wants to come so long as we have room.
YDN: What's the timeline for all this? When can we fire up our editors to start mashing up?
MF: The first APIs will be released this summer with frequent new releases and updates throughout the year.
YDN: What kind of mashups and use cases are you looking forward to?
MF: I think the possibilities are endless, and I wouldn't want to bias people in any particular direction. Let's see what people come up with.
YDN: Indeed. Thank you very much for your time and we're looking forward to see what will come our way.
Marc Frons, 52, has been Chief Technology Officer of the The York Times Digital Operations since June 2006. He previously worked at Dow Jones & Co., where he was chief technology officer for its Consumer Media Group, responsible for online product development and applications. Earlier he was consulting editor for CNN Money and vice president and general manager of AOL Personal Finance. From 1995 through early 2002, he was editor and chief technology officer of SmartMoney.com, one of the pioneering sites for interactive news and data visualization online. Mr. Frons also held a variety of senior editor positions at Business Week. He began his career at Newsweek in 1979.
Posted at 11:22 AM | Comments (0)
Digital Web just released my Step-by-Step walkthrough on how to create your first SearchMonkey application.
This is basically the demonstration we showed the attendees at the SearchMonkey developer breakfast in London and is a good starting point for those who like visual explanations.
Christian Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network
Posted at 11:06 AM | Comments (0)
Have you ever wondered which pages on the internet have hCard on them? Or hAtom? hReview? XFN? Well, now that Yahoo! Search is indexing all of these formats, you can easily search the web for them.
Just do a search for:
We sort the output for relevance too, so you can add in query terms as well. If you want to find a searchmonkey meeting advertising in hcalendar format: searchmonkey searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.uf.hcalendar.
Enjoy the Monkey.
Paul Tarjan
(|): Chief Technical Monkey :(|)
Posted at 9:21 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
We’re excited to announce the public release of the Address Book API. I say public release because while the API is newly launched here on YDN, it’s been up and running with some of the most contact-aware applications on the Internet, including Plaxo and LinkedIn.
It’s been a long time coming, both for us and for all of you. Yes, we see the question come up often on the ydn-mail: Developer Community group and we’re pleased beyond measure to finally be able release the API.
This new API provides access to one of the largest collections of address books on the Internet--the contact system behind Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, and Yahoo! Go. This means your applications already have a built-in audience. The Address Book API supports a wide range of third-party apps, such as sending invitations to seed social networks or social apps, looking up postal addresses for shipping services for online retail, and providing address "auto-complete" for messaging apps.
The API has extensive search capabilities. Once a user authorizes your application, you’ll be able to easily access that user’s address book and look for specific contacts. If you want to see which contacts are new, you can ask what’s changed since the last time you accessed the API. More details are available in the documentation.
Here are some highlights of what you can do with the API:
While we are excited about what the Address Book API can do, we are just as excited about how it works. Today, the new API provides access to a user’s Address Book via BBAuth (our browser-based authentication). Users authorize your application to access their address book data through the Yahoo! login process. Access to their address book data is done safely.
What about OAuth? Support for OAuth is coming, my friends, in due time… Seriously. At Yahoo! we’re already doing a lot with OAuth (think Fire Eagle) and it’s a big part of our plans.
The new Yahoo! Address Book API unlocks the relationships that Yahoo! members have developed on Yahoo! and makes them easy to tap into on your site. We hope you love it as much as we do and we can't wait to see what you build!
Charles Wu
Product Manager, Yahoo! Address Book platform
Posted at 9:00 AM | Comments (6)
Back in May, a group of Yahoos from the OpenID team attended the 2008 Internet Identity Workshop (IIW), the premier event in the online identity space. Past Internet Identity Workshops have facilitated significant progress in dealing with issues associated with identity and openness, so we were happy to be participating at IIW2008a as a sponsor. Initiatives that have emerged from past IIWs include popularization of OpenID, changes to the OpenID 2.0 protocol to fix a couple of security issues found by Allen Tom, recognition of OAuth as THE standard for delegated auth, and finalization of the
OpenID 2.0 spec.
Here's a quick summary of Yahoo!’s involvement at the unconference-like IIW2008a (May 12 to May 15), which took place at the Computer History Museum:
Photo credit: Joseph Smarr
One of the great things about IIW is that it brings together the best minds in the identity space every six months. It is not uncommon to see actual progress being made on open standards and on solving the problems facing the identity community. This IIW was no exception. We got together with folks from other companies to discuss the need for standardization of a Client Login API. We all have somewhat similar versions of such an API, so it just makes sense to try to standardize. We also had a productive discussion about OAuth extensions of great importance to large service providers. Expect more news in these areas in the near future.
It was evident at this IIW that Yahoo! is being mentioned by the developer community (as they give examples to prove a point or describe a use case) much more today than was the case in past IIW sessions. The Yahoo! OpenID product and the recent Yahoo! Open Strategy announcements are definitely having a positive impact in the community!
Stay tuned for updates on some specific outcomes of this forward-looking collaboration.
Havi Hoffman
Yahoo! Developer Network
Posted at 12:56 PM | Comments (0)
Yahoo! this week released a design stencil kit to help designers quickly create mockups for specifications and user testing. Stencil objects have specific meaning and can be incorporated into a design to symbolize a specific kind of module, interaction, or even aesthetic.
These design stencils complement the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library by providing tangible objects that manifest the essence of specific design patterns. The stencil kit also contains links to YUI components and Design Pattern Library entries that help bring depth and tactical execution to designs.
Stencils kits are available for OmniGraffle, Visio (XML), Adobe Illustrator (PDF and SVG), and Adobe Photoshop (PNG) and cover the following topics:
To use a design stencil, download the stencil kit compatible with your design application, launch your design application, and start adding stencil objects to your projects. Adobe Illustrator, OmniGraffle, and Visio users can ungroup stencil objects to customize and manipulate size, layout, and aesthetics.
We'll continue updating these collections as we release new patterns and the YUI team releases new versions of their code library. We encourage your feedback regarding these stencils as well as ideas for new ones!
Lucas Pettinati
Principal Interaction Designer
Posted at 11:58 AM | Comments (21) | TrackBack
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