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Yahoo! has released a new firefox extension which measures site performance based on rules for high performance websites. Requirements to install Yslow are :

• Firefox
• Firebug (Firefox-Adon)

In return Yslow will give you

• Performance report card
• HTTP/HTML summary
• List of components in the page
• Tools including JSLint

As the name suggest, Yslow will tell you “Why your website is slow”. Yslow sits in the firebug main menu.
To measure a site’s performance, just install Yslow & click on the performance tab inside Firebug or click on the Yslow icon in the status bar. Yslow also adds JSLint in the tools menu.

Source: YDN

[tags]yahoo, yslow, website, performance, firefox, firebug, extension[/tags]

Yahoo! home page has got a major feature added some days back. Its the search suggest feature. Unlike other suggests, this ones not obtrusive, so when i know what to search i need not look at the suggestions.
Thers’s an option to disable the search suggest feature. Disabling was a very simple as it showed up in the list, but i didn’t know how to enable it back.
I got it enabled only after reading the official posting on ysearchblog.
Check out the same on www.yahoo.com

[tags]yahoo, search, suggest, ysearchblog, homepage[/tags]

After finance quotes now its time for the videos to appear on the search results page. Just came across a youtube video indexed by google search. Clicking on the the traditional plus button opened up the youtube video right below the search results (autoplay). Check screeshot.

[tags]google, search, youtube, searchresults, yahoo[/tags]

The new youtube player has got a lot of updates to it. Firstly they have changed the loading indicator which appears before the video starts loading. Other features are, jumping ahead to a part of video without actually waiting for the video to fully load.
While the video is playing, clicking on the menu button will restore the video (in playing mode) to the top-left corner and display a list of relative videos at the bottom of the player. The best thing about this relative videos feature is that the user will remain engaged to the site for a much longer time. The relative videos are shown in a mac – like style. The share options are also changed. The ratings are also diaplayed at the bottom right as we hover the relative video thumbnails.

[tags]youtube, upgrades, video, player, google[/tags]

Got an orkut teaser from my friend this morning. Logged in to orkut & saw a b/w feeds button on the left. Clicked on edit feeds button, did the captcha & voila … got my flickr and delicious feeds on the orkut profile page. Nice and simple. I must say this is one of the coolest feature orkut has added till date. Unlike the videos feature, this time they have no restriction on the feeds which can be added. The add video feature ion orkut is still restricted to youtube & google videos.

The native rss button on the left says edit feeds, but all what it allows to do is add & delete feeds. The feeds are visible to all the people who can see your profile. It would be nice if they define access levels for feeds. Something like restrict the feeds to friends or certain groups. But to start off… Its a real nice feature. How about getting some meshed up feeds from Yahoo! pipes.

Now thats what I call social networking.

[tags]orkut, rss, feeds, socialnetworking, networking[/tags]

Was reading about the unlimited storage feature being rolled out by Yahoo Mail today. I’m lucky to be among the first few to have this feature . For all the people who are wondering how its gonna look. No worries, the Mascot is out there to guide you.

Before

After

[tags]yahoo, mail, yahoomail, unlimited, storage, mailbox[/tags]

Inquired about the phone for a couple of weeks, read some reviews, video reviews & finally made my mind to get the Rocking mobile. Yeah, I’ve got the Moto RORK E6 with the S9. (I’ll miss the Moto Razr V3i – my old phone).
Moto Rokr is a touch screen phone with lots of features in it. The normal pack is priced at Rs. 17,000 and the premium pack @ Rs. 22,000.

The premium pack contained

• Handset
• Battery
• Charger
• Data Cable
• Instruction manual and software CD
• Wired headset
• Bluetooth headset(S9) (premium pack)
• 2 GB micro SD card (premium pack)

It runs on Linux.

Multimedia: 2.0 mega pixel camera with 8x zoom, Video recording up to 5 hours, dedicated music buttons, stereo FM, 3.5 mm stereo jack, Advanced music recognition with music ID (I’ve not tried this feature yet), convert into a web cam, photo editor etc.
Connectivity: Bluetooth wireless technology, USB 2.0,
SD memory card slot (expandable up to 2GB), HTML browser (Opera).

See the full list here.

The best feature of the phone is its Bluetooth headset. Trust me, the sound quality is simply superb. You can make & receive calls with the headset, the headset has got 3 music keys & 3 for call handling. The FM radio cannot be used with the Bluetooth headset, it requires the wired headsets.

Oops.. I forgot to mention that Rokr is a PDA phone, it has a document viewer (cant edit documents), POP3 e-mail, Task manager, lots more.

So far i have come across just one drawback in the phone, The Real player play list takes too long to refresh. Apart from this one point, the phone is super fast. I’d recommend a must buy (with the bluetooth headset) for all music lovers.

The Motorola ROKR E6 rocks

[tags]Motorola, Moto, Rokr, E6, phone, mobile, Bluetooth, Rocker [/tags]

There are a thousand reasons to use Yahoo!, but this one’s my favorite.The Web Messenger. Go checkout the same at http://webmessenger.yahoo.com or http://web.im, there are a lot of features packed in the web messenger, but my favorite is the message history.

Source: http://yodel.yahoo.com

Google re-launches its personalized home page as iGoogle. The newer version of Google IG comes with some interesting features like a theme selector and widgets. Some of the popular widgets are AIM Messenger, MSN Messneger, Youtube, Free Text Messages (which doesn’t work in India ) and lot of them, didn’t try most of them.

Argggghhhhh.My browser crashed .. (the chat gadget did it all); Thanks to the auto save feature by WP.

They seem to have removed the Y! Messenger widget from the popular category(which was there some time back). I tried the Y! Messenger widget & even that worked out in a strange way(see screen shot – Widget title mismatch).

Overall, The iGoolge stuff looks nice; lot of options when it comes to widgets, a few themes and most importantly its buggy. So save your work before you try out iGoogle ( not every one is lucky to have an auto save feature )

Keeping track of website/Blog updates has been a real problem for all of us (including me some time back). So how to tackle this whole problem of remaining updated.

The traditional approach to this problem has been – Visiting the site/Blog & checking for updates. To overcome the approach of visiting every site we have something called as RSS Feeds.

Steps for tracking updates on a site

1. Subscribe to any free web based feed reader like Bloglines or Netvibes
2. Go to the site/Blog which you want to track and
3. Copy the RSS path of the site (lookout for an orange icon)
4. Go to the feedreader (e.g. bloglines) & click on the Add Feed option
5. Paste the Feed URL copied in step 3 & click on subscribe option

The next time you login to bloglines, you will see all the feeds you have subscribed to. You can customize the folder structure, privacy, alerts, etc.

Next time you visit a site, remember to subscribe for its RSS feeds.

Use RSS – Be organized