I’ll be spending the next two days up in the City attending the Carson Workshops Summit on “The Future of Web Apps“. Yahoo! is a gold sponsor, so I’ll be helping represent the company (as best I can…), but mostly trying to learn from all the talks and other attendees. Should be fun!
For a while I’ve been using the Y!Q context search support for individual entries on this blog. I thought it was kind of novel and might be useful, but tonight I ripped it all out. I was not able to tell how many readers were using it (I probably could have written a wrapper to track clicks or something), but more importantly I wanted to drop the weight. The Javascript library was about 36KB and on an individual entry page typically 5KB (w/o pictures), that was a lot of overhead. Just trying to keep things simple and fast around here.
Providing print stylesheets is something I’ve been interested in for a while now. Catching up on the 37signals blog, I learned that they added better print stylesheets for their Basecamp product: We’re not big printers, but our customers tell us they are. They often have to print screens from Basecamp to take to meetings, present to clients, or prepare a report for their superiors. That summary hits the key message for me: you (the website author) may not print much from the web, but if some of your readers do, they will really appreciate this support. Having well-designed print stylesheets…
I’ve always been looking for a good way to handle my “readlater” items — websites or other information that I’ve found and don’t want to forget. I started with task lists (on the Palm) and recently use a ‘readlater’ tag in del.icio.us. ToRead looks like an interesting alternative solution. It’s a free service that mails web pages to your inbox. After registering, you receive a bookmarklet that lets you quickly tag any webpage. Tagged pages are sent to your inbox where, presumably, you’ll get around to reading them. I’m going to try it for a while to see if helps…
This week Yahoo! is unveiling a public preview of the new home page design. The whole look and feel is new, which you’d expect with the periodic redesigns of this page, but what’s really cool is all the interactivity. If you’re signed in, the module in the upper right (not sure what it’s called) gives you snapshot views of your Mail, Messenger buddies, Radio, Weather, Local, and Movies. It doesn’t (yet) have the customizability of My Yahoo, but the UI alone make the My page look antiquated. The Yahoo! User Interface blog has a good summary of many UI patterns…