Stephen Skory

Three months ago I wrote that Yahoo! Mail Beta still stinks. I said that Yahoo! had fixed two of my five main quibbles with their newest email interface. Sure, they fixed two, but they were the ones I cared least about.

Lo and behold, Yahoo! came out with an updated version of Mail Beta a month ago, and more recently my server farm received the update. Let’s see how Yahoo! fares this round…

1. Fixed-width fonts. Huzzah! Numbah one gets addressed. This is big. Fixing this almost is enough for me to start using Beta every day. But only almost. Yahoo!, you get a nice green check:

2. Message replying format. Nope. Nothing new here. Same, lame behavior as before. Give us some freedom, Yahoo!. Stop putting the minority with good etiquette down! This earns you a Big Red X, and red is never a good color for anything.

3. Message quoting. Nope, again. There is still no way to differentiate the message I’m replying to and what I’ve written. Another BRX.

Yahoo!, you’re getting beat up, down, left and right by Google. They just took YouTube out from under you this week! Shape up!

Seven months ago I wrote a post covering my likes and dislikes (mainly dislikes) of Yahoo! Mail beta. It’s time to revisit it and see if Yahoo! has done anything in that time. I had five points of contention:

1. Fixed-width fonts. There is still no option for showing/composing messages in fixed-width font. Starting off weakly, Yahoo!

2. Message replying format. It still puts my signature at the top of the message. Again, they should provide the option of putting it where I want it. Uh oh, another red x.

3. Message quoting. This also has not been fixed yet. Since I use good email etiquette, having no differentiation between what I’m replying to and writing is not an option.

4. Signature new lines. Finally, something they’ve fixed. Of course, without fixed-width font, my signature still looks wrong.

5. Bugs. Perhaps there are other bugs that have gone unfixed, but the one I identified in the previous post has been fixed. So you get a green check, Yahoo!

In sum total Yahoo! is batting .400, which is an excellent baseball average, but it is a poor average for things so simple to fix. Moreover, the list is in roughly descending order of importance to me. Therefore, Yahoo! is batting more like .150, having tackled none of the things crucial to me.

I’ve tried to tell Yahoo! about these shortcomings. I’ve submitted feature requests to the appropriate place several times over the last seven months. I can’t believe I’m the only one with these concerns. But since nothing has changed, perhaps I am.

During lunch today I added a module to my photo gallery that allows me to tag photos or albums with latitude and logitude such that they are marked on a map. Using Google Maps along with the Google Maps Module for my photo gallery software, in less than 15 minutes I was able to mark my photos and albums on the earth.

I can tag photos or albums by type, so that when browsing the map, different types can be turned off or on. You can also define places to quickly zoom in on. There is a facility to map routes (like this), but haven’t tried that yet. When you click on one of the marker pins, a preview window will pop up, with a thumbnail for that photo or gallery, a link to the item, and the title or description.

It’s all very slick, and it worked on my first try. If your browser works with Google Maps, it will work with this. Go check it out!

(p.s. Right now not all browsers show the fonts the correct size, Firefox in particular. I suggest trying a different browser until I fix that problem.)

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^* Okay, many is too strong a word. Nonexistant is probably more accurate.

Since I use two popular open-source projects for my website, WordPress for blogging and Gallery2 for image presentation, I’ve always wanted a way to combine the two into a unifed look. It’s always been possible but I never quite managed to do it. Until now, that is.

WPG2 is a WordPress plugin to allow Gallery2 to fit ‘inside’ of the WordPress look and feel. I tried their version 1 some time ago, but I didn’t like it because it didn’t work very well. I tried writing my own WordPress-Gallery2 wrapper, but I couldn’t get that to work, either.

Now if you click on the My Photo Gallery link, the photo gallery will keep my rocky shoreline header image and the borders that this page has. There are still some CSS-related issues, so when you browse the gallery, the text may be too small to read. It’s too small in Firefox, but not in Safari. I have yet to figure out which browser is wrong.