Product Description
Yahoo! took the world by storm in the 1990s as a one-of-a-kind, searchable list of interesting web sites. But ten years later, it has expanded into a department store overflowing with useful and innovative tools and services-from email, blogging, social networking, and instant messaging, to news, financial markets, shopping, movie and TV listings, and much more. Today's Yahoo! keeps you connected with every aspect of your life and every corner of the Web.
Yahoo! Hacks shows you how to use, expand, personalize, and tweak Yahoo! in ways you never dreamed possible. You'll learn how to:
- Fine-tune search queries with keyword shortcuts and advanced syntax
- Manage and customize Yahoo! Mail, using it as your universal email client to access all your other accounts
- Explore your social networks with Yahoo! 360, blogging your life, keeping up with friends, and making new contacts
- Store, sort, blog, feed, track, and otherwise share photos with Flickr and RSS
- Make My Yahoo! your Yahoo!, and personalize Yahoo!'s many properties
- Roll your own Yahoo! applications with Yahoo! new Web Services API and Perl, PHP, Java, Python, Ruby, or the programming language of your choice
- Visualize search results and topics, mash up images from around the Web, and remix other web content
- List (or hide) your site with Yahoo!, and integrate Yahoo! Groups, Messenger, contextual search (Y!Q), or other Yahoo! features
Whether you want to become a power searcher, news monger, super shopper, or innovative web developer, Yahoo! Hacks provides the tools to take you further than you ever thought possible.
From the Publisher
About the Author
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Excerpted from Yahoo! Hacks by Paul Bausch. Copyright © 2005. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Use the Yahoo!Music Engine API to find out which artists appear most often in your collection.
Visualizing an entire music collection has never been easy.Whether the music is in stacks of vinyl records or in racks full of CDs,it ’s tough to get a picture of all of the artists,albums,and genres that are so unique to each of us. Moving music from the physical world to the digital world of computers has helped,because digital formats can store information about albums and artists that can be extracted and analyzed.
This hack helps you visualize your virtual music collection by showing you a list of artists in different font sizes:the larger the font,the more tracks you have by that artist.With this approach,you can see at a glance whether you have more tracks by Kraftwerk or The Propellerheads,and which artists you have the most tracks from.
Using different-sized fonts to represent popularity is sometimes called a tag map and was pioneered by the photo-sharing site Flickr [Hack #67 ].
You can see the most popular photo tags on Flickr in this format at flickr.com/photos/tags .
This hack creates a tag map –like interface for the artists in your music collection by tapping into the Yahoo!Music Engine.
Yahoo!Music Engine
The Yahoo!Music Engine (YME)is a free music player for Windows.One feature that separates YME from the pack is its plug-in architecture operating behind the scenes.A plug-in is a bit of code that adds a feature to an application that wasn ’t originally built into the system.Yahoo! has made plug-ins fairly easy to write by making their API available through JavaScript.And because YME contains a web browser,it ’s possible to write a web page that can control and interact with YME through scripting.
If you ’re familiar with writing JavaScript for web pages,you ’ll find writing YME plug-ins fairly painless.The following code is a sample plug-in that you can build and install for YME that helps you visualize the artists in your music collection by popularity.
The Code
The code for this plug-in was written by Dave Brown at Yahoo!and is a standard HTML page with JavaScript.The script queries the YME database,gathering a list of the artists in your library.From there,the script counts how many tracks you have from each artist and displays the artist names in the appropriate font size.
To get started,save the following code to a file called artistCloud.html :
body {
background-color:#fff;
font-family:Tahoma,Verdana,Arial;
color:#354251;
}
.tag {
margin-bottom:10px;
padding:5px;
}