This blog has a new location!

OK. blogger has been fun and easy to use, but I miss trackback, rss, and other features I could have using an other blog engine...

So, this blog has moved to vrypan|net|log where I setup a new blog using WordPress.

I managed to move the old postings, however I lost the comments... I'll se what I can do.

My Yahoo Search and Yahoo Next are Launched

From Jeremy Zawodny's blog: "Yup, it's another public beta. This time it's My Yahoo Search. And it's launching in Yahoo! Next, which is where we're starting to put stuff we'd like the public to play with...

read the full post.

-- Update:
http://mysearch.yahoo.com/ is really nice. You can add comments to the results returned, block sites, send the results to someon else. Nice.

Clusty the Clustering Engine

Clusty the Clustering Engine

It looks like this search engine is the joint effort by looksmart.com and vivisimo. Looks nice and fast. I will need some time to use it before I can understand its features.

Firefox is hot (and here are the numbers to prove it!)

It looks like everybody is talking about Firefox. It's not just WIRED that declared Firefox "hot", or Charles Cooper, Executive Editor, CNET News.com, who dumped IE for Firefox. It's the whole Internet community that seems to love it!

I did a little research and here are the numbers to prove it:

- spreadfirefox.com reports a 3,000,000 downloads in the period 14/9 - 2/10!


- w3schools.com report a steady growth in Mozilla-based browsers that visit their site. It is interesting to note that Mozilla has doubled it's usage (8,2% to 16,9% in the period Jan 2004 - Sep 2004)! (a nice graph of the data)

- my g-metrics.com reports an exponential growth in the number of pages reported by google for "firefox".


(I guess Intelliseek's Blogpulse Trends would show the same thing, but the site was not working at the time I wrote this...)

Does anyone else have access to similar stats?

g-metrics gets a face-lift and much more...

[27/9/2004 11:51 UTC, Update: you can now see the top-10 results returned by google.]

After many experiments, the new and improved g-metrics.com is alive!

* UI improvements.
- The user interface has been redesigned from scratch, and I think that is is much more usable than the old one.
- This comes with a new logo.

* New features.
- There are separet RSS feeds for each "query".
- If you are a registered user, you can have an agregated RSS feed for all the queries included in your watchlist. When you add or remove queries from your watchlist, the RSS feed is automaticaly updated.
- Much like the agregated feed described above, you can use a link that goes directly to your watchlist.
- A prefiled google search box is displayed with every report, so "going to the results" is one click away.
- Users can change their personal details (username, email)
- when a new query is added to the database, google is imediately polled, so you don't miss todays results.

* More to come. During the whole redesign thing I changed the backend a lot. There are some new features comming..
- "normalized results" (percent of the total pages indexed by google). -many thanks to Matthew Hurst for the idea.
- a preview of the top 10 results per query returned by google,
- "tags" much like gmail does that will hepl you organize a long watchlist much better.

* BUGS + COMPATIBILITY
I tried a lot to make the "transition" transparent, however there may be some external links that are now broken as the page names have changed.
I also noticed that sometimes, if you had already checked the "remember me" button at the old version, you may have problems logging in to the new. I'm working on it, but you may try to delete the old cookies stored by g-metrics, login and logout once. Then everything should work fine.

As always, I'm eager to hear from you!
Panayotis.

Web Services You Wish Yahoo Offered?

Jeremy asks what we would like to see in a Yahoo! API, sould Yahoo! decides to publish one....

Please, everything! The nice thing with Yahoo! is that they are much more than a search engine. They are a complete application platform (mail, calendar, stocks, contacts,...) Give us access to it and we'll make aps!

Creating custom HTML checkboxes

During the g-metrics redesign (it will soon be ready!), I faced a common problem in HTML design: while most elements on a HTML page can be easily an nicely customized using CSS, checkboxes and radio button keep their original, browser-specific look.

I looked arround the Internet, but the alternatives I found were based on creating a little "checked" and the related "unchecked" image and swapping them using javascript. This approach has many problems, and the most important one is that you have to create a different set of images for every size, color, etc. you want to use.

So I came up with a solution that I consider more elegant and easy to use. It is based on displaying a "webdings" (font containing special images) "check" inside an area with border. Javascript is used to dynamicaly change the font color so that the check becomes visible/invisible every time you click. It is easy to acheve other effects (like garying-out when unchecked) just by changing the colors.

Here is a sample code (you can view it here):

<html>
<!--
How to create a custom checkbox.

2004-09-22, Panayotis Vryonis
http://g-metrics.blogspot.com/

-->
<head>

<style type="text/css" media="screen">
.customCheckboxON { color: #0000aa ; }
.customCheckboxOFF { color: #ffffff ; }
.customCheckbox {
color: #ffffff ;

border: 2px #0000aa solid ;
background: #ffffff ;
font-weight: bold ;
font-family: webdings;
}
</style>

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"><!--
function chkHandler(id) {
var obj = document.getElementById(id) ;
c = obj.className ;
if (c == 'customCheckboxON') {
obj.className = 'customCheckboxOFF' ;
document.myform.my_checkbox.value = 0 ; //update a form field
}
else {
obj.className = 'customCheckboxON' ;
document.myform.my_checkbox.value = 1 ; //update a form field
}
}
//-->
</script>

</head>
<body>
<form name="myform">
<p>
Check this: <span class="customCheckbox"><span id="box1" onClick="chkHandler('box1');" >a</span></span>
&nbsp;<input type="text" name="my_checkbox" id="my_checkbox" size="1" value="0">

</p>
</form>
</body>
</html>