onfocus

Last week a copy of Yahoo! Hacks arrived at my door, and I was finally able to flip through the pages. It's very satisfying to see months of work in Word and Photoshop become a solid object that you can pick up, throw on a table, or use to prop open a door. It's really a novel feeling for someone who usually writes in the virtual world. Today the book is available at Amazon without any of that pre-order nonsense. ;)

Yahoo! continues to release new features (and hire people I know) at lightning speed. Just in the past few weeks we've seen Yahoo! Podcasts, Yahoo! Blog Search, Yahoo! Site Explorer, and Yahoo! Instant Search. The public perception of Yahoo! has definitely changed over the course of my writing, and I think the fact that Yahoo! Hacks even exists will be surprising to people who haven't been keeping up with Yahoo! lately.

When I started working on Yahoo! Hacks, I thought I knew the site fairly well and that I'd mainly be focusing on hacks related to new offerings like Yahoo! Web Services, Yahoo! 360, Flickr, and Y!Q Contextual Search. After a while though I came to view Yahoo! as a big city with hidden alleyways and entire neighborhoods that had always been there but were new to me. Of course there are plenty of hacks related to the new services, and I think the book is a good way to get up to speed with what Yahoo! has been up to technically. But I also hope people pick up Yahoo! Hacks and learn something new about perennial Yahoo! features like My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Mail, and Yahoo! Groups. And maybe you'll even discover some new Yahoo! neighborhoods.

That's my pitch. ;) I'm very proud of the book, and I want to thank everyone who contributed hacks, hack ideas, and general encouragement. You can order Yahoo! Hacks at Amazon, read some sample hacks, or flip through it before you buy at bookstores everywhere. It also makes a great door-stopper.

O'Reilly put up eight Beta Hacks from Yahoo! Hacks. Find out how you can use Yahoo! to translate pages, monitor your commute, visualize your music collection, search your web site, program with the Yahoo! API, and other fun hackery. And that's only eight hacks—imagine what you can do with 100. ;) The book isn't out yet, but you can pre-order from Amazon: Yahoo! Hacks. (I'll get a little kickback if you order through a link here on my site.)

Update: Matt McAlister tried out the Visualize Your Music Collection Hack and wrote about the results on his blog: Downloading podcasts with Yahoo! Music Engine.

cool, Yahoo! Hacks is available for pre-order at Amazon!

Anyone out there know of a simple, easy-to-use WAP emulator that works with Yahoo! Mobile? I'm trying to get some screenshots for Yahoo! Hacks, and I've tried a bunch of different emulators. The Yospace Emulator has been the easiest to use, but it doesn't seem to support Yahoo!'s cookies—I can't log in. I've registered and installed about five different Nokia developer kits, and still can't figure out how to fire up their emulator. My own phone, the Sony Ericsson s710 has a fantastic browser, but I can't find an emulator for it—and the T610 emulator errors out when connecting to Yahoo!

Ideally it'd be nice to find an emulator that would also be able to receive SMS messages as well, but I'd be thrilled with a simple WAP emulator that works. If you have any ideas, please send them my way. Thanks!

Update: I may have to resort to actual photos of my s710:



Update 2: A big thanks to AJ for recommending the Openwave Simulator! I can log in at Yahoo! with this emulator, and I think it'll work well for screenshots.

Brian started a public Yahoo! Hacks Flickr Group yesterday to trade some of the more visual Yahoo! hacking going on. Feel free to check it out, join, and/or contribute!

I set up a Yahoo! Group for Yahoo! Hacks. The funny part is, the word "hack" isn't allowed in group descriptions, so I had to disguise the word as "h4ck". I'm hoping this book will help change that. ;)



If you're interested in discussing potential Yahoo! h4cks or just want to follow along, tune into the Yahoo! Hacks Group.

Update (3/31): Unfortunately, I had to make the Yahoo! Hacks Group invite-only instead of open to the public. With this many years of working on the web, you'd think I would have learned some fundamental truths about it by now. ;) What can I say, I'd like to be optimistic.

Now that etech has come and gone, I can finally talk about my latest project: Yahoo! Hacks. I'm writing furiously now, and the book will be edited by Brian Sawyer at O'Reilly. (Here's a shot Brian took of me signing the contract at etech. And vice versa.) If you've been watching tech news at all lately, you know this is an exciting time to be focusing on Yahoo! Somewhere between the Flickr deal, their new weblog tool, web services, the buzz game, Yahoo! Music, their publisher network, My Yahoo! RSS, (and the list goes on) it seems that Yahoo! is morphing into something new. I'm looking forward to writing about what they're up to, and how you can use the rest of their domain in unique ways.

As with all of the books in the Hacks series, Yahoo! Hacks will be a group effort. You can think of me as a hacks curator, bringing together the best tips, tricks, and code I can find. That means I need help from you—the hack artisan—in bringing novel Yahoo! uses to a wider audience. Do you use Yahoo! in a way that Yahoo! may not have envisioned? I'd love to hear about it. (And if you'd like to share a hack publicly, feel free to post it at the Hacks site.) I contributed Google Smackdown to Google Hacks way back when, and as you can tell that led to more and more hacks-related writing for me. There's something satisfying about showing others you can do more with technology than what you'll find in the help docs. Plus it's fun to see your work in (what feels like) a more permanent and tactile medium like a book—I hope you'll consider contributing.

The schedule for the book is pretty fast, so I'd like to apologize to my friends and family up front—see ya in a few months! ;) In the meantime, I'll be one with Yahoo!

I was lucky enough to get a sneak peek at the new Yahoo! Web Services API. I wrote some thoughts and a quick tour of the API for O'Reilly Network: Yahoo! Web Services.

I'm looking forward to seeing what people do with all of that search data—images, local listings, news, video, and (of course) web. But before you tear off and write your own Yahoo! applications, just make sure you're not going to use Yahoo! Web Services to "operate nuclear facilities" as it's prohibited by their terms of use. I know most people don't read those things, so I figured it would be good to point out. But don't let that limitation stop you. There are plenty of other less-obvious uses for Yahoo! Web Services that are even more compelling. ;)

Here's the official scoop from the Yahoo! Search Blog: Announcing the Yahoo! Search Developer Network and Search Web Services