I’d like to get some feedback on an idea for a plugin I developed for the Yahoo! Messenger.

My idea was to collate all the different search services I am using day by day into one plugin to save me the time to open several tabs when a contact asks a question.

I’ve uploaded the screenshots as a Flickr stream and would be happy to hear if you’d consider this worth while, and – more importantly, if there is anything else that would be cool and sensible to add.

Before you go nuts about “add this and that”, make sure that you can also provide an API I can use (in JavaScript / REST based) to get the results.

Some other options I thought about and discarded:

• Audio search (as it is two steps with the Y! API)
• Shopping search (what for, without localisation)
• Local search & Upcoming.org (for the same reason)

Thoughts? Either comment on flickr or here.

Are you quite proud about the amount of people linking to your site?

If you are, be smug about it and show it to the world, using a Smugpanel

Simply put a JavaScript in the HEAD of the document, customise it to your smug-URL, add a smug DIV and anyone can see who links to you.

I just found an interesting fact about Picasa . The rather cool thing about Picasa – amongst other bits like the very smooth interface – is that it keeps your original images largely unscathed. When you rotate, resize or remove red eyes, Picasa will either just store what you have done in a file in the folder, or keep a copy of the original image, in case you messed up.

As a means of storage, Picasa stores a file called picasa.ini in each folder you applied changes to. Now, the rather funny bit about that is that it also does that when you want to hide a folder from view – for reasons that are totally your own private matter. Picasa will not show these folders, and you can even protect them with a password. However, it does not encrypt the folder or anything like that, all it does is add a

[Picasa]

P2category=Hidden Folders

[encoding]

utf8=1

to the Picasa.ini file.

This means that if you ever get to a computer with Picasa on it and you want to be the coolest hacker in the world, simply search in Windows (or even better Total Commander) for all Picasa.ini files that contain the text “Hidden” and you found what was not meant to be for prying eyes.

Now all you need is either the figure of Angelina Jolie or the sunglasses of Keanu Reeves and you are the coolest hacker on the block.

I had some issues with one of the code examples for the upcoming book. MSIE has a very annoying bug that when you use an opacity animation – for example with YUI or jQuery: When the element you want to fade in our out has no background colour, MSIE messes up the font for some reason. Another problem is that when you use jQuery for the fading, the element needs to have hasLayout set.

Check out the testcase

It is great if a company offers their data to developers to use on their own sites. It is even better when it is pretty painless to embed this data into your own products. Nearly all of the Yahoo! services also offer a REST API to use results of searches in your own web sites – the difference to a lot of other services is that you could also have the data in JSON format rather than XML.

What this means? You don’t really need any Ajax trickery to use the data, a simple SCRIPT tag is enough.

Find out more about Embedded Dynamic Web Search Forms with JSON

This will probably be a first in a series of tips and tricks with the Y! APIs.