The Yahoo! Hacks book from O’Reilly was just released, continuing the interesting “Hacks” series. If you get a copy, check out Hack #16 — “Tame Long Yahoo! URLs”. The author references my Yahoo! Local bookmarklet that some folks have found useful. My Yahoo! Local vCard converter came out later, so I missed the cutoff for the book.
Last month I wrote a short entry about the interesting Kate Winslet American Express commercial. Last week I was contacted by a Forth Worth Star-Telegram reporter who found my explanation of the movie references in the commercial. Yesterday the reporter’s column was published in the Star-Telegram (free reg required): Q: In the American Express commercial that Kate Winslet does, she talks about her real life being dramatic enough. Was she really in jail, lost her memory, etc. — all of that before the age of 27? — K.L., Southlake A: A lot of my regular readers would probably bet money…
Today Yahoo! unveiled support for podcasts — finding, downloading, and listening. I’m just starting to play with it, but it appears to support both Yahoo Music Engine (YME) and iTunes. (If you’re already using YME, be sure to get the podcast plugin.) The site seems to focus on finding podcast series and individual episodes, with decent search and tagging capabilities. I thought it would keep track of podcast subscriptions for you, but instead it’s basically a searchable directory. You can listen online with a lightweight player, or download a “.pcast” file into YME or iTunes for subscribing and downloading the…
I’m back to trying out FeedBurner again, primarily to see if their stats capabilities are helpful for my RSS and Atom feeds. I notice a lot of people change their “advertised” feed to be the Feedburner URL, but I think it’s cleaner to use a URL on your domain and just redirect (assuming you have this capability with your web host). That way, you can try FeedBurner for a while and return back to your original links if you want. Here’s the sequence I used: Create two new templates in Movable Type (rss_fb.xml, atom_fb.xml), filling with the same content as…
Talk about good timing! Just yesterday my semi-annual AdSense check arrived from Google — this is still kind of ironic given that I work at Yahoo. Internally there had been some talk of a similar system for smaller web publishers and today, the Yahoo! Publisher Network Self-Serve Beta was announced: You may have heard a few rumors over the past few months about Yahoo! developing more solutions for small- and medium-sized publishers. Well, those rumors are true, and we’re 100% committed to living up to them. Our new self-serve platform will offer publishers new sources of revenue, starting with our…