Archive for the ‘Web’ Category

One Reason Yahoo Mail Falls Behind Gmail

Tuesday, August 19th, 2008
Posted in Web

Despite Yahoo offering @ymail.com and @rocketmail.com email addresses (which they are probably doing because there are no good names left especially with all the spammers registering bogus names).

When you want to check email, you don’t get on the first load. You have to click on it, because you are shown a newsblock first.

This is done for 2 reasons

  1. It’s another pageview
  2. There maybe some news headline that catches your attention and bring you to news.yahoo.com

However, Google knows you login to your mailbox to read email, not news.

What Topix Should Do

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008
Posted in Web

Topix, is a site that displays lots of local information to people all around the US. However they also put a lot of US and World News. I personally think the site is becoming too cluttered, even more than a local newspaper site. There are tons of portals out there that do what they do already, so why not focus on becoming the lighter, faster local portal? They have already gone after many of the “verticals” that newspapers use (real estate, classifieds, jobs).

  • Feature local data more. Don’t just show you have events and classifieds, tease some of that information.
  • 1 day of weather teasing is worthless, give people more of reason to check the city page
  • Make one of those 3 columns with a different color, everything looks the same, meaning people are less likely to pay attention to it.
  • Add autos
  • Get a designer and start uncluttering the website

Topix has the ability to become a unique nationwide local site with tons of local information, but they keep shying away from it trying to be just another portal with some local content. If they want to be serious about local information they need to display nothing but local information on the homepage. Otherwise I don’t see their site taking off in local markets around the US.

Give Users What They Want

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008
Posted in Web

I recently saw a website do this on the weather page.
Weather Choice

If you’re users are clicking on the weather page, give them the weather. Why does anyone have to choose between 2 TV stations? I guess this was a political decision, because Nexstar Broadcasting owns 2 different affiliates in the same city. But the user can care less about what station gives them the information, besides both stations already share the same website.

Yahoo Pipes Spam

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008
Posted in Web

I was searching Yahoo Pipes and ran into some spam on it. Why would anyone bother spamming up Pipes? Just so someone might click on one of them? I guess spammers will junk up anything they can.
Yahoo Pipes Spam

Free Open Source MP3 Player

Saturday, June 7th, 2008
Posted in Web Development · Tags:

Added auto-numbering, auto-play option and next and previous buttons. Removed rewind button.

I originally wrote this to play just one MP3, but added the List component to it so it can play a whole list of MP3s. It reads an XML file, has a optional path, optional autoplay, features a loading animation while the XML file loads, playhead, volume slider, mute button (that remembers where you last muted), download bar and progress for each mp3, play button, previous track button, next track button and a time index. I saved it as a Flash MX 2004 file and it will work with Flash Player versions 7 and above.


It’s released under a BSD license, so feel free to use it.

Here is a sample XML file

<mp3s path="subfolder/" autoplay="false"><!-- optional path needs trailing slash, autoplay should be set to true or false -->
<mp3 mp3_title="Track One" mp3_filename="audio.mp3" />
<mp3 mp3_title="Some Song" mp3_filename="surf.mp3" />
<mp3 mp3_title="Audio File" mp3_filename="yhj.mp3" />
<mp3 mp3_title="Sound Effects" mp3_filename="fx.mp3" />
</mp3s>

Download the mp3scrollplayer.

I plan to add the following features in future versions:

  • Optional citation (by so-and-so)
  • Build my own list and scrollbar (rather than relying on a component).
  • Ability to customize colors and hover color