Again, a drive to find colleagues to work for the company that pays my rent and outrageous lifestyle:

If you are a web developer based in the Bay Area and you’d like to work for Yahoo! on one of our fastest growing and demanding products, have a go and contact me. We are looking for web developers with very solid knowledge in:

• CSS
• PHP
• semantic HTML
• DOM scripting

If you think you got what it takes, drop me an email or comment here (comments are moderated and don’t show up, so don’t worry about your data – don’t use any links) .

I am in Santa Clara / San Franciso this and next week, and will attend the Flickr birthday party on Saturday.

[tags]Yahoo,job,offer,webdeveloper,santa clara,bay area,san francisco[/tags]

just something I’ve been playing around with for my upcoming book. The script reads all hCards in the document, checks if they have geo location and hides those. It then creates a new Google Map and sets markers with popups showing the rest of the address data when you click them.

• Check out hcard2gmap

[tags]Googlemaps,maps,mashups,hcard,microformats,javascript,hack,demo[/tags]

This just boggled my mind. Someone emailed me about onlinetools.org, where I obviously don’t sell anything or care much about SEO:

• Got an email with an obvious SEO tools url, let’s say www.OMGFABSEOWOW.com
• My answer: thanks, I make sure people learn you send out unsolicited emails.
• Their answer: After taking a look at your website i thought the tool set would be something of interest. not tring to solicite, just tring to turn you on to somethingnew. (Ed: Not my typos)
• My answer: I know SEO tricks, I work for Yahoo. Btw, your “contact us” link is not working but links to the same advertising home page – this made me wonder.
• Their answer: www.OMGFABSEOWOW.com is not my site, it is a program that we promote. I know there are THOUSANDS of businesses using Yahoo stores. Is there anyway to get OMGFABSEOWOW (Ed: this time really in uppercase) name to them and have the set recommended by Yahoo?

I guess being ruthless is part of “marketing”...

Oh and yeah, Post#400!

[tags]SEO,unsolicited,wtf,marketeer[/tags]

I earned myself some time out, so I trolled youtube for the worst music videos:

Armi & Danny: I wanna love you tender

A classic, nothing more to add.

Carl Lewis: Break it Up

Grace Jones really let herself go.

Hurra Torpedo: Total eclipse of the heart

Ok, I really want to see those guys live. This is so surreal it is great again.

Radiorama Aliens

You are sleeping with what producer again? Both of you?

Apache (Disco Version)

There is nothing worse, seriously. How much cocaine can you take to be able to stand recording this?

dennis madalone: america we stand as one

Cause nobody wants to be mad alone

Eddie Murphy: Party all the time

That was not much after the amazing Raw and Delirious. WTF?

Black Lace: Aga Doo

Push what?

Dimple Minds: Blau aufm Bau

A German punk classic. The whole video production cost was about £1k

Modern Talking: Cheri Cheri Lady

The blonde guy is Dieter “5 Töne (five different notes)” Bohlen – still one of the most successful pop producers ever!

[tags]bad,music videos,wtf,funny[/tags]

Today I was parachuted in to Abilitynet to give a quick talk about Ajax and accessibility as their original presenter couldn’t make it. I had given the same talk in German last year and updated some of the information on it before going there.

Showing off the new and cool Yahoo! Accessibility Stakeholder Group shirt (“what is the button for?” Braille!) I spent an hour talking about the ins and outs of Ajax and its accessibility issues. You can download the presentation – PDF 400KB for some light reading.

What I found in the demos that I showed and the subsequent testing with different screen readers (IBM homepage reader and newest Jaws) is that it is not enough to assume that you know what screen readers do. While the changing of the link text as shown in example 3 and 4 actually is considered a good practice to tell screen reader users that something changed it only makes sense when the user re-reads the current line in Jaws and it even is worse in HPR, as the user gets asked to reload the page or press “Home”. The intended focus shift in example 4 (and partly nicked from Gez Lemon’s example) didn’t work either, I am sad to say.

It really seems that we either have to start hacking for different screen readers or just wait until WAI ARIA Live Regions are supported cross-browser and platform.

In any case, this is also a good thing as it keeps people from testing something with one screen reader and considering it accessible after that. Blind users are as diverse and different in their internet usage as sighted people are.

[tags]ajax,accessibility,screen readers,usability,presentation,aria[/tags]