The CSS-Tricks site has a cool article this week about using weather data to change your website’s appearance. Of note for Yahoo developers is that they’re using the Yahoo! Weather web service to fetch current conditions. The article has an accompanying sample page which focuses on the CSS and PHP code necessary to swap out the page appearance. The remaining work would be to intelligently identify where the visitor is coming from and fetch their weather automatically. Kind of a neat application for a service that probably doesn’t get a lot of attention.
Joel Spolsky has a great article today regarding the Microsoft release of the Office binary file format specifications. Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? If you started reading these documents with the hope of spending a weekend writing some spiffy code that imports Word documents into your blog system, or creates Excel-formatted spreadsheets with your personal finance data, the complexity and length of the spec probably cured you of that desire pretty darn quickly. It’s a good summary and Joel raises some good points about how the file format likely got so complicated over time. He’s also…