December 31, 2008

Vote BOSS for the Crunchies

Make your vote count in the 2008 Crunchies!

Please show your support by voting for BOSS (Build your Own Search Service), Yahoo's game-changing open search web services platform, in the Tech Innovation/Achievement category for the "best new technology achievement or breakthrough of 2008." For the win! Voting closes at midnight PST on Wednesday, January 7, but until then you can weigh in on the past year's most memorable gadgets and devices, best bootstrapped startup, best mobile applications, most striking CEO or founder, etc. Click this badge to cast your vote for BOSS.

The 2009 Crunchies' competition is hosted by GigaOm, VentureBeat, Silicon Alley Insider, and TechCrunch "to recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year." At the time of posting, nearly 100,00 votes have been cast across all categories by members of the web community. This year's super-hoopla awards ceremony takes place on Friday, January 9, 2009, at San Francisco's venerable Herbst Theater. Why BOSS? Here are some compelling reasons from earlier in the year.

A safe, healthy, and happy new year to one and all.

Thanks!

~the YDN crew

Posted at 4:38 PM | Comments (2) | Permalink

December 28, 2008

YSlow 2.0 early preview in China

Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of talking about the next iteration of Yahoo's performance tool YSlow at a conference organized by CSDN in Beijing. While YSlow 2.0 is still under development, it was a great opportunity to share the excitement about the upcoming release and also talk to people who are actually using the current version in their daily development life. We wanted to get a sense of whether we're headed in the right direction.

CSDN stands for China Software Developers Network: a vibrant online community with over 3 million members who create about a million forum posts and 50,000 technology articles, every month. The network runs on an in-house community platform allowing members to join discussions and forums, run blogs, chat, get personal hosting, personalized search and recommendations. The community recognizes and honors contributions through a rating system that rewards the best content with greater visibility. In addition to the online community, CSDN has a book publishing house, prints China's authoritative IT technology magazine Programmer, and provides training and talent recruiting services.

In addition to the YSlow talk, I also gave one about JavaScript, you can check out the slides on Slideshare:

1. YSlow 2.0
2. Object-Oriented JavaScript

Needless to say it was a great experience to meet and talk to the Chinese developers and answer their challenging questions about YSlow and OOJS. And then again, how can you not like a conference that opens in the spirit of the 2008 Beijing Olympics - with cheerleaders!

Stoyan Stefanov
Performance guy / YSlow 2.0 architect

Posted at 8:04 AM | Comments (6) | Permalink

December 24, 2008

Open in Asia

Where Sunnyvale hosts a 24-hour hack-a-thon, the Yahoo! Taiwan office hosts an entire week to celebrate the new open vision of Yahoo!. Of course, they develop a bunch of great hacks while they’re at it - because what YDN event would be complete without some hardcore hacking.

The first part of Asia Open Week was an internal application development contest for Yahoo! engineers, where developers from the Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong and Australia offices worked diligently to create apps that consumed our public APIs, services, and platforms, including, but not limited to, YAP, Open Mail, and Blueprint. Before the hacks began, presentations were delivered on topics such as an introduction to Y!OS, a deep technical dive into YAP, and overviews of Open Mail and Blueprint. Developers then had about a day or so of development time to get everything completed and ready for judging. We saw impressive applications from the different offices, with winners in different categories for the different platforms. Here are some of the app highlights:

Stockr
Built on open mail, as a mobile space app using Blueprint, and as an open application on YAP, Stockr took high marks from the judges. This is a social stock-trading game allowing you to make virtual trades using real data. Tying in calculations for stock ratios, portfolio graphs, live stock news, and profile and connection information so that you’re fully integrated in the social experience with your friends, this application was incredibly feature-rich.

Paper Visualizer
I must admit, this was an impressive Flash application built on top of the YAP platform. Using your social connection information, this app rendered your friends in an interactive 3D environment where they are displayed as "paper human" cutouts with the nice Yahoo! default image smiley. You can then view your connections by categories such as gender, birthday, name, etc. This is a unique interpretation of the social connection data, and aside from a few “paper people” nightmares it provoked, this was definitely a top app.

Next Auction View
I didn’t realize how prevalent auctions were in Taiwan until I saw all of the auction hacks that were developed. Next Auction View was one of the ones that really stood out. Another Flash application built on top of YAP, this app took raw auction feeds and displayed an interactive visualization reminiscent of the iTunes CD art display.

Primetime TV Guide
An Open Mail hack, this application displayed primetime TV guide information for shows in different countries. This app included features to let you save favorite shows to your list to keep track of what you want to watch, as well as a social dimension that let you share your lists with friends.

Below are a few photos of the internal hack event at the Yahoo! offices in Taipei, Taiwan:

After the Yahoo! offices celebrated the spirit of openness with a wonderful awards ceremony, it was time to turn our attention to the external community. On Saturday, December 20 at the Agora Club hotel in Taipei, YDN hosted another round of presentations on Y!OS, YAP, and how to develop open and OAuth applications. Developers, who had previously submitted their applications for judging, were then presented with awards for the top applications.

Below are a few photos of the external event, including pictures of the speakers and award winners:

The notion of “Open” that is being fostered in Yahoo! is one that I have become very impressed with. I see a change happening within the company where a unified idea is being integrated into all products being developed for the community. This same idea of open is one that gives back to the development community as a whole, where our products become even more of a freely available service to extend any application or website.

You can view my Y!OS presentation from Asia Open Week on slideshare, or click through it here for a closer look at developing apps on the Yahoo! Application Platform.

Jonathan LeBlanc
Senior Software Engineer / Technology Evangelist
Yahoo! Developer Network

Posted at 10:05 PM | Comments (0) | Permalink

December 23, 2008

The Open Stack: An Introduction

Last week Digg hosted a great introduction to the Open Stack at their offices in San Francisco. The event included a ton of well-known speakers and advocates of the Open Web like David Recordon, Joseph Smarr, Eran Hammer-Lahav, and Chris Messina. Video coverage should be going up on the Social Web TV shortly, but until then, here's Tom's 5-minute intro to the Open Stack.

The "Open Stack" refers to a set of technologies that work together to make it easier for web developers and users to manage access to user data across the Web. The Open Stack looks like this:

As you can see, the technologies depicted are being implemented by a number of major players and leading companies developing open and social web applications.

At the top of the stack, Open ID is a specification that allows people to log into a web site using credentials provided by another web site. One example: people using 37signals's Basecamp service can sign up for multiple accounts using a single Open ID. 37signals allows them to switch between their accounts using their OpenID as proof that access is permitted. This is a great feature for contractors who use Basecamp to work with multiple client accounts.

At the next level, XRDS-Simple is a discovery mechanism. This means it allows a site to figure out the location of the other services you want to use. For example, if you signed into a site with your Open ID the site knows your user URL. It can use that user URL to figure out where your address book is because the XRDS-Simple on that page tells it. The site can then go and use that address book service to import your address book without you having to do a thing.

Eran Hammer-Lahav speaking about "discovery"

This helpfully segues into OAuth, a mechanism to grant permissions. OAuth comes in two flavors: 2-legged and 3-legged. Each leg represents a different party involved in web service access. Two-legged OAuth consists of a web service and a web service client. Both the service and the client each have a key that identifies them. In 3-legged OAuth, the third leg refers to the user. There is a key that can be loaned to the web services client to let that client access a user's private data. Effectively OAuth allows users to control access to private data, such as a personal address book.

On the Social Web, people are at the center of everything. PortableContacts provides a common protocol to share address book and other contacts data. Portable contacts allows the example above to work. Since both sites have a common protocol to use to operate on address books they can talk to each other. Without PortableContacts, you would have to implement a new system for each web site with contact data you wanted to integrate.

The final layer of the stack is probably the most famous. OpenSocial is a framework for describing social activities on the Social Web. This framework can be freely implemented by a site to add social features which are interoperable with other sites. It also provides the description and scope of portable social applications that can be run from network to network.

We'll be featuring some more pieces on the Open Stack here on the YDN blog, so keep your eyes peeled!

Tom Hughes-Croucher
Yahoo! Developer Network

Photo-credit: Silverisdead on Flickr

Posted at 6:17 PM | Comments (0) | Permalink

Video quickie: Add-on Con Closing Keynote - Installing Software

"The web has always been about the workaround," says Doug Crockford in this next snippet from the closing keynote at Add-on Con earlier this month.

Thanks to Robert Reich from OneRiot for producing and posting these bite-sized clips of highly nourishing browser discourse.

Posted at 8:48 AM | Comments (0) | Permalink

December 22, 2008

Video quickie: Add-on Con Closing Keynote - Browser Security

Earlier this month, Yahoos Douglas Crockford, DHTML evangelist/architect, and Lloyd Hilaiel, from BrowserPlus, participated in the first-ever Add-on Con, a conference to celebrate and explore the business and technology of browser add-ons. OneRiot's Robert Reich, one of the conference organizers, posted a series of short videos from the closing keynote, which Doug moderated.

In this first clip in the series, panelists representing three leading browser vendors, Joshua Allen (Microsoft), Mike Shaver (Mozilla), and Brian Rakowski (Google) respond to the question of browser security and the challenge of add-ons.

Thanks Robert!

Posted at 10:05 AM | Comments (0) | Permalink

December 15, 2008

Yahoo! Mail rolls out a smarter inbox

You may have seen today’s news announcing the next generation of Yahoo! Mail — rolling out a “smarter inbox”experience to users. One way to make an inbox smarter: make applications that can work within it, opening up Yahoo! Mail to content and services built outside the Yahoo! network.

We’ve talked here before about the Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS), and in October we released the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP), Yahoo! Social Platform (YSP), and Yahoo! Query Language (YQL), giving developers access to Yahoo!’s tools and data to start building applications for Yahoo!’s vast audience and the Web beyond.

Today, we’re extending these technologies to Mail, providing developers with access to our documentation and guidelines for building apps that run on this new canvas. With a highly engaged and active audience of hundreds of millions of users around the world, the opportunity to create innovative applications that drive traffic back to your site and increase user engagement with your services is huge. Because of the sensitivity of the information in people’s inboxes, we’re adding developers gradually while we refine the application security and privacy protections our Yahoo! Mail users demand.

To create applications for Yahoo! Mail, developers will be using the Yahoo! Application Platform to build, test, and submit their apps. Developers will be able to embed a JavaScript application inside an iframe running in the all-new Yahoo! Mail. These apps can then interact with the Mail container—and do things like register a callback when a message is dragged-and-dropped onto your app, pop open a new Compose tab with app-generated content, or fetch social data from around the Yahoo! network through YQL—using the JS APIs we provide. They can also call out to your own or a third party’s web services, optionally using OAuth or a Flickr-style signed-call-home for authentication.

Our users are looking for applications that help them communicate better and be more productive. The apps in this first release - including Flixster, Wordpress, and Xoopit- allow them to share media with their friends and families, enhance their email experience, and to generally “get things done.” Mail is an essential part of people’s daily lives, and our 275 million users’ inboxes are already full of contextual information with tons of opportunity to build upon. It’s also universally sensitive data. We’re taking an incremental approach so we can learn what our users want and what developers need to be successful. Today we've begun by beta-testing select applications in Yahoo! Mail with a limited group of Yahoo! Mail power users in the U.S. In 2009, we plan to extend this functionality more broadly to mail users worldwide.

There’s a long list of areas we’d like to open up while we’re “rewiring Yahoo!.” As we expand the API list, we will also invite developers to build applications on the all-new Yahoo! Mail gradually and deliberately over 2009. We don’t have a wait list in place yet, but stay tuned to this blog for more detailed information in the coming months.

To find out more about application development in Yahoo! Mail, visit the Yahoo! Mail developer pages within YDN . Explore the docs and best practices for developing apps on the all-new Yahoo! Mail. It’s never too soon to start coding.

Mark Risher
Director, Product Management
Yahoo! Mail

Posted at 1:05 PM | Comments (2) | Permalink

Opening up My Yahoo!: Q & A with James Kittock

Editor's note: Today we've announced a slate of product updates that continue to open Yahoo! up to developers. Starting today, developers can use the Yahoo! Application Platform to build apps that can be added and viewed on the My Yahoo! canvas. Developers can also use a new Theme API on My Yahoo! to design and share creative background themes.

James Kittock, My Yahoo! product lead, answered some questions about why we're opening up My Yahoo! and how developers can now reach the largest audience of personalized start page users.

1. What is My Yahoo!?
My Yahoo! is the leading personalized start page, with more than 20 million current monthly visitors in the U.S. and over 40 million worldwide. My Yahoo! users are highly engaged and passionate about finding great content and services on the Web. My Yahoo! is their dashboard for keeping up with all this information.

2. What are you opening up to developers today?
We’re giving developers the ability to create applications for My Yahoo! using the Yahoo! Application Platform. We are also giving developers the ability to create page themes (with background colors and images) through the My Yahoo! Theme API.

3. What can my application do on My Yahoo?
When you build an app using the Yahoo! Application Platform, you can create a ‘small view’ that is embedded in a user’s My Yahoo! page. The small view serves as a user's personal "dashboard" into what is going on with the app. As an example, consider a fantasy sports application. The small view is where users get updates on trade requests, breaking information about their players, etc. The small view has one or more links to the canvas view, where users interact most with the application: executing trades, reviewing player statistics, and so forth.

4. What are the key advantages of building applications on My Yahoo!?
As a developer for My Yahoo!, you now have access to our highly engaged audience of users who visit their My Yahoo! page multiple times each week. The small view on My Yahoo! provides rich interactivity between users and applications and will drive users to the large view of the app.

5. Are you opening up My Yahoo! to all developers?
Yes. Any developer can create an app with a small view. Any user can take that app and add the small view to their My Yahoo! page.

6. How do I get started developing my app for My Yahoo!?
Go to the YDN dashboard to start building your first new “Open Application” on My Yahoo!. Docs and design guidelines are all available on the My Yahoo! landing page.

7. How will My Yahoo! users discover and share my application?
With more than 500 million Yahoo! users around the world, we have an extensive and growing social graph that will enable viral adoption. People will share apps they've discovered and added with their connections via updates. Applications that use the Yahoo! Social APIs generate updates that will show up in the new Yahoo! Toolbar, Yahoo! Mail, and a growing list of places across Yahoo!. You can also create your own “Add to My Yahoo!” buttons for your app and publish them anywhere – on your site, blog, etc. The My Yahoo! content gallery will feature select YAP apps in a new category called “Open Apps” – go to My Yahoo! and click on “Add Content” to see this in action.

8. What makes an application compelling for My Yahoo! users? What types of apps are people looking for?
People want apps that help them increase productivity and save time by providing an at-a-glance view of everything they care about on one page. We think people will love applications that add social elements to their My Yahoo! experience. To help you get started, we wrote some guidelines for building apps on My Yahoo!.

9. What applications are you launching on My Yahoo! today?
We're showcasing some great apps from developers at Flixster, Labpixies, Mytopia, Playfish, RockYou, Zynga, and Watercooler. They’re a mix of fun, casual, and productivity apps. They’re all live on the site now, so you can check them out.

10. Do apps on My Yahoo! support the OpenSocial spec?
In your Yahoo! open application, the code for your Canvas view can include calls to the OpenSocial JavaScript APIs. The small view does not support JavaScript at this time. Read more about our support of the OpenSocial spec in our documentation.

11. I heard that you’re going to open up other parts of Yahoo!. Is this true?
Absolutely. Today we also announced that we’re opening up Yahoo! Mail through our next-generation “smarter inbox”. By allowing open applications right in your inbox, Yahoo! Mail is opening up to all kinds of communications tools from outside of the Yahoo! network. We’ll open up more Yahoo! canvases to developers throughout 2009.

Posted at 1:00 PM | Comments (2) | Permalink

December 14, 2008

Future of the Internet III (2020 or bust)

I’ve been reading reports from the Pew Internet & American Life Project and sharing them with colleagues and friends, all the way back to the year 2000, when the non-profit “fact tank” began publishing its work studying Internet trends and activities and their impact on how we live. That year, Pew covered the early days of Napster downloads, online election news, wired churches, trust and privacy, online shopping and gaming habits, web use in the workplace, and more.

Since then, Pew Internet reports have explored every aspect of how U.S citizens use the Internet and how it has transformed friendship, family, and community life; the way we work and play; the way we learn; the way public policy is made; the way media is distributed, consumed, and shared. Pew Reports have provided me with data to help make sense of hunches and observed behaviors, identifying patterns, describing trends, and offering facts where once there were none.

So, not surprisingly, during a quiet time early in 2008, when a Pew survey invited me to assess “scenarios about the effect of the Internet on social, political, and economic life in the year 2020” and serve up some Internet punditry of my own, I couldn’t resist. But I didn't expect to find my own opinions and prognostications amongst those of the experts, thought-leaders, academics, and analysts who were consulted and amply quoted within The Future of the Internet III, authored by Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie, and released Sunday. I was one of hundreds of survey respondents “'working in the trenches' of building the Web“ and it turns out our views "were distributed in ways that paralleled those who are celebrated in the technology field."

The report foresees that today's mobile phone will morph into the dominant connectivity tool for Internet access in 2020, voice recognition will improve, the network itself will be bigger and better if not ubiquitous, and human behavior will continue to surprise, for better and for worse. Will we have gotten over privacy? Will transparency make us more tolerant? Will the lines of demarcation between personal and professional time become even harder to discern? Will we touch, type, talk to or think at our devices? Opinions and perspectives abound.

You can read the report online, download the PDF, or order up a hardcover copy if Santa hasn't slashed your budget.

Havi Hoffman
Yahoo! Developer Network

Posted at 10:12 PM | Comments (2) | Permalink

December 10, 2008

Opening the web and retrieving all the goodies

The internet is an interesting thing, as it is a bit like the matrix. Whilst normal end users see something like this:

Developers have the more outside-the-matrix point of view as we tend to look at the data behind the facade:

And if you are one of the true believers in web2.0/web3.0 where the web is the platform and the framework then it turns into something like this:

There is nothing better than yummy yummy data that you can retrieve, mix with the right other ingredients and spices to create something that is even healthier, more nutritious or even caters for special diets. In essence, giving access to data will make your product all the more successful as other chefs can cater for you.

Getting to the yummy parts of one or several sources can be a bit of an problem though. Imagine a tin of good solid food you want to get to. The easiest and most versatile tool would be a swiss army knife with a can opener.

The web equivalent of a pocket knife is cURL, a library that allows a developer to make scripts behave like a browser and get access to the source of any web site or web service. You can for example go to the command line and simply enter the following:

curl --url http://www.thedailypuppy.com

The result is the source code of the page that you could run through other commands to get to the bits you want to retrieve.

The same works for RSS feeds or other types of data:

curl --url http://thedailypuppy.com/rss

cURL is amazingly powerful when you know how to use it - you can simulate other user agents, send and retrieve data, even spoof cookies. However, just like with the swiss army knife you'll have to put a lot of work and effort into getting to the goodies. Regular Expressions are most likely the most versatile way to do it and when it comes to being a developer they are not the first thing to go into your head easily.

What the web needed was a very fast, electrical can opener that also might be coupled with a microwave to pre-heat your dish. The equivalent for that would be Yahoo Pipes.

Yahoo Pipes is amazingly powerful as it gives you a very handy and beautiful interface to remix the web:

This pipe for example searches twitter.com for my name and filters common false positives. The outcome of your pipe laying is then available as a very simple URL that can take parameters and give you the output in a lot of different formats:

• Show as RSS feed:

  http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=92feb878651258ca1d4575d3568766e9&_render=rss&s=heilmann

• Show as JSON:

  http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=92feb878651258ca1d4575d3568766e9&_render=json&s=heilmann

• Show as JSON and wrap in foo():

  http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=92feb878651258ca1d4575d3568766e9&_render=json&_callback=foo&s=heilmann

• Show as JSON, wrap in foo() and search for "Christian":

  http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=92feb878651258ca1d4575d3568766e9&_render=json&_callback=foo&s=Christian

If that is too low-level for you and all you wanted to do is show a badge that you can change the look and feel, this is possible, too:

And this is where it got tricky. Whenever you build an interface that is beautiful, intuitive and terribly powerful you will get one request: can we have a command line interface to this. This is just how developers roll, there is not much we can do about it.

The other issue with Pipes is that it is high maintenance to some degree. Whilst you can provide parameters, it is still a very graphical interface that is impossible to use for somebody who for example cannot use a mouse or see the interface. This might not be a large group, but in the end I myself find using a keyboard tool like Quicksilver for example easier than dragging and dropping and using my mouse a lot. When you want to change the functionality of a pipe beyond parameters then you'll need to go back to the editor, something that made several people unhappy, too. In other words, we needed a good, sturdy can opener that doesn't need batteries.

This is where the newest tool to open the web comes in: Yahoo Query Language or short YQL. With YQL you have a SQL style syntax to get very detailed information from all the services Yahoo offers the world and you can also access the web through it.

The main thing to try out YQL is the interactive console at http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/. There you can select from a lot of demo queries and you can see the outcome live below your query.

The real power of YQL lies in using and mixing Yahoo services and - with authentication - the Yahoo Social graph. However, for now let's just look at another thing to do: remix the web. If you scroll down on the right hand side you'll find "Available Data Tables" and there is a "data" sub-menu with the items atom, csv, feed, html, json, rss and xml.

This can be used to create YQL queries for anything on the web. Say for example you only want the names of the latest dailypuppy.com puppies, this can be done with the statement select title from feed where url='http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheDailyPuppy' and wrapped in the correct REST call it becomes:

http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20title%20from%20feed%20where%20url%3D'http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2FTheDailyPuppy'&format=xml

Notice that you need to add a "public" before the yql to use the information without authentication!

If you want the data in JSON and wrapped in a function called myPuppies, just add the correct parameters called format and callback:

http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20title%20from%20feed%20where%20url%3D'http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2FTheDailyPuppy'&format=json&callback=myPuppies

Where it gets really interesting is the html option. Whilst Pipes has the option to retrieve an HTML document and get it as a string, YQL went further and actually allows you to use XPATH queries over the HTML document. Say you want to get all the latest images in my blog posts. You could use select * from html where url="http://www.wait-till-i.com" and xpath='//div[@id="content"]//img' for this:

http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20*%20from%20html%20where%20url%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wait-till-i.com%22%20and%20xpath%3D'%2F%2Fdiv%5B%40id%3D%22content%22%5D%2F%2Fimg'&format=xml

The opportunities are endless, especially once you dive deeper into the YQL documentation and learn about joining queries.

Want more? Comment about your needs and wishes :)

Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network

Posted at 3:53 PM | Comments (3) | Permalink

BarCamp Liverpool

This weekend I travelled back home to attend the two-day unconference spectacular that was BarCamp Liverpool. With 200 places available, local media interest, and a great venue, this was billed as one of the biggest BarCamps ever in the UK. On the day of there were more than enough people for the event to be a Trending Topic on Twitter.

This was my first BarCamp, and it turned out I wasn't alone. I'd estimate that at least 25% of us were newbies, which is a great sign that the BarCamp idea is going strong. New blood is vital to prevent this sort of event turning into a social club for the same group of people each time.

Photo credit: Katie Lips

At conferences, I usually like to go to sessions which have nothing to do with my day job, and there was plenty to choose from here. As I was going to be speaking myself, I thought that listening to Phil Winstanley's talk about "How to be a dead good speaker" would be a good idea. I mixed that with "Getting started with Arduinos - How to build a twitter monitoring Alertuino" by Adrian McEwen, which gave me a good idea of what I would like for Christmas!

To satiate my technical side, I attended a session on "Readable Perl" (which may just have convinced me that I should put aside my loathing for that particular language), and another by Cristiano Betta on "Using wordpress for OpenID." This finished with a discussion on where we go next with OpenID, particularly how to promote it to the masses.

Among the other sessions, I particularly enjoyed Alistair MacDonald's "Privacy open discussion," Ian Forrester's demonstration of Pacemaker, and "How to pimp yourself" from Richard Quick.

In all of the sessions I attended, my favourite part was the discussion of the topic after the presentation. While any conference will have question and answer time, the more informal nature of BarCamp makes it a much more personal and inclusive experience. It is great to hear other people's opinions, and to have both the speaker and other audience members comment.

Photo credit: Katie Lips

At (un)conferences with multiple streams you will always miss more than you see, but I have to say that I got more from BarCamp Liverpool than from most conferences I attend. Combine all of this with a party on day one including what was essentially a free bar, some of the best pizza I've ever eaten, and the obligatory game of Werewolf, it is safe to say that this won't be my last BarCamp, and I will be first on the list when Liverpool announces its next.

Ian Pouncey
Web Developer, Yahoo! London

Posted at 8:47 AM | Comments (0) | Permalink

December 9, 2008

Good news about YUI: GitHub, documentation builder and ARIA-enabled widgets

If you thought that the YUI team had gone into hibernation to prepare for the spring and the final release of YUI3 - think again. There are three great pieces of news revolving around our beloved development framework:

YUI is now available on GitHub: http://github.com/yui. This has been a constant thorn in the side of the developer community - that whilst YUI is free (BSD license) people weren't able to commit or check out the code directly from a version control system. Git seemed to be a good solution, and there are instructions on how to use it available from the YUI team.

The team now also made YUI Doc - the tool that creates the YUI API Docs available for everybody. It is a python script and allows you to keep maintenance easy whilst providing implementers with valuable information.

Last but not least Todd Kloots, developer of the YUI menu, released a video of his tutorial on Developing Accessible widgets with ARIA.

Rock on YUI!

Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network

Posted at 2:23 AM | Comments (0) | Permalink

December 7, 2008

Monkey Finds Microformats and RDF

In a blog post earlier this year, we announced that people could search for just entries with specific microformats.

There are 2 things we'd like to announce regarding that:

1. We now support adr, geo and tag microformats. Yay!
2. In the name of progress, we have added an extra namespace to the IDs to make room for other types of extraction. Anyone who is using these for their microformat searches, can now find our structured data with these queries.

• hCard (searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.page.uf.hcard)
• hCalendar (searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.page.uf.hcalendar)
• hReview (searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.page.uf.hreview)
• hAtom (searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.page.uf.hatom)
• hResume (searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.page.uf.hresume)
• adr (searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.page.uf.adr)
• geo (searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.page.uf.geo)
• tag (searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.page.uf.tag)
• xfn (searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.page.uf.xfn)
• RDFa (searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.page.rdf.rdfa)
• eRDF (searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.page.rdf.erdf)

And as before, you can look for hResumes with PHP on them, Geocoded pages involving Santa Clara, or RDFa pages related to SearchMonkey

Keep monkeying around.

Paul Tarjan
(|): Chief Technical Monkey :(|)

Posted at 11:41 PM | Comments (3) | Permalink

December 6, 2008

Cheese Dreams - the Yahoo Developer Network evening in Grenoble, France

Last week Sophie Major, Jose Palazon and Chris Heilmann went to Grenoble, France to introduce the Yahoo Developer Network to the local developer community. It was the first Yahoo event of this kind in the city in the heart of the Alps and we are happy to pronounce it a success.
Fortified with a quick visit to the local Christmas market and a three-cheese fondue we arrived early in the Yahoo! offices to get the Yahoos on the ground ready for what we planned on the evening.

Around thirty developers showed up at the evening to join us in the recreation area of the Yahoo office to learn about the ideas of the Yahoo Developer Network and get a quick introduction to some of the APIs, web services and SDKs we offer.

Jose introduced the Blueprint mobile platform:

And we introduced the audience to some APIs and tricks to use them:

All in all it was a great experience and we hope to be back soon and see how local companies, startups, and developers are able to use our offerings to build something much easier than before.

Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network

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December 3, 2008

Geeks and green anacondas in Boulder, Colorado

The first Tuesday of every month, technologists from Boulder, CO and the surrounding area converge on a location disclosed only to meetup attendees for a showcase of new and emerging technologies. Robert Reich organizes the event and does a bang-up job of making the hour time well spent. Many things fit under the broad topic of "new technology," and perhaps the ongoing success of the New Technology meetup is due to its well-rounded program. (A standing-room only crowd of 250 attendees came this last Tuesday).

The December 2 event opened with a lightning round of announcements about local job opportunities, service offerings, and upcoming events. The folks who spoke ranged from venture capitalists to individuals looking for work to the state government seeking feedback on how to use technology to better engage the public. True to Boulder's reputation, the audience was refreshingly, well, green...

After 10 minutes of locals finding each other, we jumped into a presentation from the Big Green Company by David Mandell. David demonstrated how applying a sound business model and smart grassroots marketing to the clear goal of helping young kids solve some of the common problems they face can create something of value. I disagree, however, with his claim that the Big Green Rabbit is targeted at kids between 3-6: My wife and I can't stop playing The Green Anaconda Song:

After the rabbit ambled off the stage, we heard from Ari Newman of Filtrbox, a Boulder startup that lets you "filter the web" to better navigate the chaos and gain a concise picture of what news agencies and bloggers are saying about a particular topic. Along the theme of better tools for extracting specific information from the web, Kimbal Musk showed us One Riot , which combines Yahoo!'s open search technology with data-driven prioritization algorithms to "prioritize... information based on its current popularity with our community [which] makes OneRiot's search results relevant, fresh, friendly, and pulsing with the real-time energy of the web." OneRiot has a creative means of gaining realtime data from college students everywhere, which fuels the prioritization algorithm: Vertical search at its best!

Finally, I was honored to give an overview of Yahoo!'s most recent open source project, BrowserPlus™. (You can view the full presentation below. Thanks Robert!) Given the creativity of our lively emerging community, I was able to present work contributed by developers from the community. This included desktop notifications on search.twitter.com (via greasemonkey) by Udayakumar Rayala, and the µJuicer tool from Mattt Thompson (CMU hacker and former YDN intern) that allows developers to drag and drop vcards into the site get them reformatted into HTML, which can then be embedded within a site.

Overall, the Boulder New Technology Meetup was an awesome way to spend a Tuesday night. While the folks I met were extremely varied, I was impressed by how casual, friendly, and passionate the audience was. If you're ever in Boulder for the first Tuesday, drop by!

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December 1, 2008

phpNW08 - the PHP Community gathers "up north"

For many years, the members of the PHP usergroup in Manchester, England, gathered regularly in small groups. All those years they had that vision of a huge proper conference for the North-of-England PHP developer community. This year the time was right. On November 22, 2008, I attended the first of hopefully many upcoming PHP NW conferences.

The lineup of speakers was quite impressive and included travelers from near and (very) far.

Derick Rethans from the Netherlands opened the event with his keynote entitled "KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid)." Manchester local Adrian Hardy followed with a very interesting Session called "MySQL EXPLAIN Explained," showing how easy it can be to optimize MySQL queries once you understand the EXPLAIN command. After that Ciarán Walsh taught the audience how to get into regex in his talk "Regular Expression Basics." PHP core developer Johannes Schlüter came from Munich to show "What’s new, what’s hot in PHP 5.3," including features like the long awaited namespacing. This was also one of the most discussed new things during the breaks, as the syntax for this feature simply uses the "last available" separator: the backspace "\" and is now widely described as very useful but also very ugly...

After the lunch break, another guest from the Netherlands, Stefan Koopmanschap, gave a very interesting talk about "The Power of Refactoring" showing how refactoring helps keep a project up and running while enhancing it's maintainability.

A very interesting and also very personal insight was presented by Stuart Herbert from Cardiff, who spoke about how he and his team developed and launched a twitter-to-SMS application in only seven days. Especially interesting was that he not only shared the successful parts but also what he would do differently today.

A panel discussion about the "State of the Community," featuring the PHP core developers Steph Fox, Ivo Jansch, Scott MacVicara, and Felix De Vliegher, wrapped up the day and provided behind-the-scenes information on how PHP itself is developed.
The day ended with a party at the club around the corner, before the visitors entered their planes and trains and the locals started planning the next meeting. Hopefully there will be a PHPNW09. :-)

Dirk Ginader
Web Developer, Yahoo! London

Posted at 7:44 PM | Comments (2) | Permalink

YDN at BarCamp Sheffield, UK

This Saturday I went up north to attend BarCamp Sheffield 2. Held in the Showroom Café Bar, it was the perfect location for anyone travelling in from out of town given that it was literally just across the road from the train station. This was perfect for me since I'd been up since 5am to get there for opening time!

The first thing I noticed was the number of people I didn't know. Where at a London based BarCamp I'd know maybe 80% of the attendees, at the beginning of the day in Sheffield I would have been hard pushed to have identified even 10%. Not that that's a bad thing - the life blood of BarCamps is getting diverse groups of people together to share the knowledge that everyone has. It turns out though that I wasn't the only one who didn't know many people at the event - there were many who had never been to a BarCamp before, and weren't sure what to expect. As one person said, "I was expecting everyone to be really nerdy, but... they're not."

Photo credit: Pete Hindle

The main thing I noticed with this BarCamp was the different focus that people brought. For me, the day was dominated by discussion groups about non-technical things which directly influence how we use the web and beyond. Alistair McDonald led a discussion about what community means, and whether it is possible to grow one deliberately or if it is only possible to give a place for one to grow if it wants to. The second discussion I attended was led by Emma (unfortunately I didn't get her surname) and revolved around what we value on the web, and how it is possible to make money from that knowledge. This session continued long into lunch and in total took almost double its allotted time purely because there was so much to talk about.

The final session of the day was a discussion of what it is to meet people (and associated Jedi Mind Tricks), led by Pippa Buchanan, herself a first-time BarCamper. Once again, this round table discussion ran far longer than originally expected (definitely not a bad thing), taking in topics such as initial meet and greets, Myers-Briggs typology and almost inevitably the effect of social networking sites on our relationships. This was actually one of the most interesting sessions I've attended at any BarCamp, and just goes to show how important it is to keep bringing in fresh faces with fresh perspectives.

Unfortunately I was unable to stay for Sunday's sessions, as I had other commitments, but from all the twittering it's obvious a good time was had by all. A huge thank-you to all involved for organising the BarCamp, and I can't wait for the next one.

Neil Crosby
Web Developer, Yahoo! London

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