Things that made me happy this morning:

• May the fourth be with you – it is Star Wars Day!
• The YQL console now lists community open tables from github
• The Bay Area’s public transport system has a very nice API
• A nice photo series of old game controllers and consoles as X-Rays
• James Broad has a good step by step tutorial how to use iSight for a timelapse video
• PopeyesJokes on YouTube shows that you can create a lot of UGC with a simple video editing suite and a lot of enthusiasm
• What not the crochet tells you exacty that.
• The iSnort is an iPhone app to either make you look properly Hollywood, or to get you kicked out of any club. Also check the disclaimer on the bottom of the page.
• A great list of code comments
• Jacob Kaplan-Moss has info on the worst REST practices to avoid
• Wedesigner Depot praises 1,2,3 as a good usability practice
• Some very dedicated hackers found 48,000 lbs of 70mm tape – the only copy of extremely high-resolution images of the moon in an abandoned McDonald’s and started digitizing them.
• An art student in the UK shows how to make a car disappear. Take that James Bond.

I just came back from Paris where I talked apparently very animated to around 50 developers about all the goodies Yahoo offers developers:

• Get the slides without the notes [PDF, 8.6mb]
• Get the slides with notes [PDF, 8.6mb]

I’ve spent the ride on the Eurostar editing the recording of the talk. I simply used Audacity and the built-in microphone of my MacBook Pro so the quality is not stunning but does the trick.

• Listen to the audio recording of the talk [mp3, 41.1mb]

I like being in Paris, developers have very good and challenging questions there, the coffee and food simply rocks and I can be in and out in a matter of hours without having to wait at airports and spend hours in the air being unable to use my laptop. We’re now waiting for feedback what other talks people in Paris want us to give and I am sure I will be back before long.

Yesterday evening I was very happy indeed to go to the National Maritime Museum in London to talk to representatives of several Museums about data distribution, YQL and open tables.

The whole thing was initiated by Jim O’Donnell who had spent quite some time with YQL and NMM’s data.

In my talk Reaching those web folk [PDF, 6.2mb] I covered the switch from a web sites as end points to open data as an opportunity to reach many more users and turn any of your visitors from a receiver to a relay broadcasting your information to their friends, contacts and distribution channels you are not even aware of.

You can download the audio recording of the talk, too: Reaching those web folk [MP3, 76.6mb]

Also thanks to Mia Ridge for taking notes in case you want someone else’s view.

Some days ago (I lost track with all the travelling and time differences) I gave the first talk at Yahoo7’s Open Sessions in their ludicrously beautiful offices in Sydney, Australia.

• You can also download the slides PDF if you don’t want to sign up for SlideShare

In order of appearance I talked about:

• The Yahoo Design Patterns
• The design pattern stencils
• Graded Browser support
• The Yahoo User Interface library
• The YUI CSS grids builder
• YUI widgets
• Information how to skin YUI widgets
• How to extend YUI widgets by subscribing to custom events
• Progressive Enhancement with Autocomplete
• Progressive Enhancement with Data Table
• Yahoo’s exceptional performance information
• YSlow
• Yahoo BOSS and examples I built with it like Keywordfinder and Unsafe Search
• Yahoo! Pipes
• YQL and how to use it to retrieve creative commons licensed photos of Sydney.
• YQL open data tables and how to use them

Distributing your information all over the web has become a common practice over the last few years and it makes a lot of sense. By covering lots of distribution channels you can reach various audiences and get comments and feedback from them.

You also make yourself independent of a single online resource – if your server is unavailable your data is still around. I could go on with the benefits of distribution (after all I’ve written a book on the subject) but let’s take a look on the flipside: by spreading your data all over the web you also spread yourself thin and you want a single resource to act as your main URL.

People have been telling me for a while that they don’t have time to find all the things I leave across the web and that they are wondering if there’s a single entry point. One Solution is FriendFeed but you want to be able to style your “online profile” more than that.

This is where YQL comes into the equation. Using YQL, a YUI CSS grid, a few dozen lines of PHP and a bit of CSS I managed to pull together My online portfolio http://icant.co.uk and you can do this as easily. The following screencast shows you how it is done:

You can also download a readable version of the screencast for ipods.

Since I put together the screencast (which was a bit hurried as I needed to catch a flight) I’ve updated the idea with yet another script that scrapes the resulting HTML document to create an RSS feed of all my data on the web.

• Check out the source of index.php
• Check out the source of feed.php

Using YQL has a few more benefits than reading all the different sources yourself and mixing them up: the results are cached for you, YQL’s connection to the web is very much likely to be faster than yours which makes the fetching process easier and you have full control over what’s happening as YQL output gives you diagnostics information.

I’ll talk more about in YQL in various talks in the nearer future, and there are even more interesting changes to the system itself around the corner. Stay alert for awesome updates.