Posts Tagged ‘yahoo’

SimplePie is a new PHP library made to make parsing RSS feeds easy and fun. Yes I said fun, because its very easy and the docs are well written. RSS is more than just news, it can be images, video and podcasts. Mash up the data however you want, I’ve seen some innovative and unique things done so far. They also offer sample code on making a site like popurls/Original Signal.

Figure I’d share some code I used with SimplePie and a Yahoo Weather RSS feed. I can’t post it all on the homepage as its really long. It does transform and output the data nicely (not any CSS styling but I do calculate the wind direction and some other things). Please note that Yahoo only permits you to use their Weather RSS feed on non-commercial sites.

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I remember back before 2001 or so when Yahoo! Auctions was free. It was almost like it was a beta version, as they introduced many new features little by little. Sure they copied some ideas from eBay, but one nice feature was to autosubmit auctions until they sold. I used that feature quite a few times. Later on they lowered the resubmission maximum to five times, then you had to recreate the auction to submit it again. Then around 2001, Yahoo decided to make them require people to pay to use them. They went down to about 10% of the auctions they had before. Even after they made their auctions free again around 2005, they never got the users to come back. It was primary a site with lots of fraud going on. I’ve seen lots of new laptops selling for like $100-$300 dollars (almost all sold from Brooklyn, New York), and it seemed all the sellers only had like 2 or 3 reviews all by each other. As far as I know Yahoo didn’t care either that this was going on. If they had stayed free all these years they might of been able to gain market share, who knows. Back in 2001, Yahoo went through a lot of their properties to figure out ways to make some money and cut costs. They also made changes to Yahoo Mail about this time also. They no longer allowed free POP access and it seemed they made their spam filters very weak, in an effort to make people pay extra for better spam protection. I guess Yahoo is having some more growing pains.

Yahoo! US Auction sites are retiring. Last day to list your items: June 3, 2007 | Last day to bid/buy: June 16, 2007