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…
Earlier I wrote about the apparent lack of website traffic during Super Bowl commercials, but on this site at least, writing about Super Bowl commercials causes a huge (10-fold) jump in traffic (click for larger image):
SixApart just released a really interesting tool to help owners of Movable Type websites customize their style. To learn more, read the announcement on the blog – “Introducing the Movable Type Design Assistant” – or head directly to the design assistant and start playing with it. The assistant is a step-by-step wizard that starts with one of a few popular default templates, lets you choose from six standard column layouts, and tweak your CSS. At the end it shows clear directions for implementing your new design on your site. I liked the column layout in particular; it really makes it…
Here’s an interesting report from yesterday quoting Akamai Technologies which found that traffic to advertisers’ website didn’t increase appreciably during the game: Akamai delivered the Web sites and advertising content for approximately half of the companies that aired commercials during the Super Bowl, according to company spokesperson Jeff Young. This year’s advertisements featured fewer commercials with so-called cliff hangers, which drive viewers to a company’s Web site to see the conclusion of the ad, Young said. I wonder if there is a good baseline to compare this against. It’s probably not realistic to expect a traffic increase during the game.…