Archive for October, 2006

Yes, indeed Sylvester Stallone s signature character was inspired by a real life boxer named Chuck Wepner…

As Answers has grown, we have invested heavily in keeping the site clean. nbsp; We have both computer scientists and a small army of editors aimed at removing bad content from the site. However, it has taken longer to remove abusers than we d like. nbsp; Some of the abusers, or trolls, wrongly report abuse on perfectly legitimate questions and answers, and in determining right from wrong we sometimes make mistakes. nbsp; Some of you have reported that some unwarranted violation notice emails have been sent out to undeserving Answerers for posting content that does not actually violate the Answers community guidelines. We would like to apologize to anyone who has wrongfully received one of these violation notices. We feel that this is completely unacceptable. We are not only working on fixing this, but also enhancing our procedures for handling abuse reports so that situations like this will hopefully not arise in the future. Aside from our problem with trolls, we ve just learned that our violation emails are being sent out with a code error in the return email address making it difficult for Answerers to appeal wrongful deletions. We ve pushed through a fix that has corrected this, so if you ve received a wrongful deletion, sent an appeal, and have not heard back from us please resend your appeal as there is a good possibility that we did not receive it. Unfortunately, this only solves a piece of the problem. As Answers continues to grow, so must our process for handling reported abuse. We are in the working on ways to improve and adapt the structure for handling abuse on the site. When stuff like this happens it is extremely frustrating for anyone wrongfully accused of contributing to abuse of Yahoo! Answers. The Yahoo! Answers Team feels your pain, as it is not fair to see unwarranted deletion of great content while actual abuse continues to slip through the cracks. nbsp; nbsp; Community Feedback We are pursuing a variety of solutions to improve the way in which abuse is reported and removed from Answers, but we would love to hear some constructive feedback from the community regarding a couple specific issues. You may have some thoughts that we haven t considered, so please let us know what you think. nbsp; nbsp; nbsp; nbsp; nbsp; nbsp; nbsp; nbsp; nbsp; How can we improve our report abuse process so that it cannot be abused by trolls? nbsp; nbsp; nbsp; nbsp; nbsp; nbsp; nbsp; nbsp; nbsp; nbsp; How can we improve our methods of detecting and hunting trolls on the site? Even though we are not always vocal about each and every idea or suggestion that is passed along, our product team reads every suggestion and takes your feedback into consideration during product design. Again, we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused. Let us know what you think in the forums. nbsp; Yahoo! Answers Team

And, yes, it supports Firefox too! Today, we re proud to announce the launch of the Live Search Box, to bring the power of search to your Web site or blog through a cool widget. Check it out: When the user enters a query, the search box dynamically builds a floating lt;DIV gt; on your page to display the search results. You can customize the query in the first tab to search your site, your macro or anything else, while the second tab will return general web search results. The floating lt;DIV gt; will position itself appropriately, whether you decide to place the box on the left, right, top, or bottom of your Web site. The search box also comes in a pure HTML flavor: The HTML version is a simple lt;Form gt; element that you can paste into your site and which will redirect search results back to the http: www.live.com page. You can customize this search box to search either a specific Web site or the entire Web. Sound like fun? Check it out on search.live.com siteowner, and let us know what you think. And keep your eyes open for a few posts on hacking the search box in the next couple of days. Note this feature is currently only officially supported for the US market. Happy Halloween, Nathan Buggia, Live Search Marketing

This Widget gets the World Population Count from http: www.census.gov main www rss popclocks.xml. Version History Change in RSS feed, broke showing date and time. Fixed.Adjusted centering of date and time line.Changed JavaScript variables names.The version of the Widget I uploaded I used the Widget Convert and made a flat version which has issues with Windows. I uploaded a new zipped version, let me know if this works on your Windows version by leaving a note and also what version of Windows you have.

This Widget gets the US Population Count from http: www.census.gov main www rss popclocks.xml. Version History First Release of Widget. Based on my code from my World Population Widget. Replaced Flat Version with Zipped Version. Flat version does not always work on Windows.

View cameras from all over Portland and the state of Oregon with this Widget. Here 39;s what you get:? 369 Traffic Cameras? 26 Scenery Cameras? 3 Airport Cameras Version History 1.0.0 New Widget

This is a countdown to the release of the Sony PlayStation 3 in Europe and Australia on March 1st, 2007.

The Premiere Virtual Branding Magazine in Second Life.Pick up your digital or virtual copy here: www.slbusinessmag.com Version History http: slurl.com secondlife Egremont 34 234 39 First Release.

So, now that you ve a provisioned a Live Search Box for your site, and b updated it with a cool look and feel, you are finally ready to build the search query of your dreams. Back in the old days, search boxes generally gave you two options: 1 search the whole Web or 2 search only your site. With the advanced query parameters of Live Search, you now have complete control to search the subset of the Web you define, and get the results that you are looking for.Let s take a look at several scenarios posted here on MSDN Searching a predefined set of URLs. For example, if you would like to constrain the search to your Web site, or a specific group of Web sites. Using a predefined search macro. For example, if you would like to use one of the macros from the Live Gallery to power your search engine. Each of these macros is predefined to search a specific topic, such as health care, or something less academic, such as Britney Spears. Searching your Web site s neighborhood. A new feature that lets you search a Web site and all the sites to which that Web site links. This could be really useful in a blog, where the author is recommending additional sites or news articles. If you really wanted to, you could include the sites that link to your Web site, too. Advanced search parameters. You can combine a few additional query parameters with the aforementioned scenarios to look for things such as specific file formats, RSS feeds, or results by language or country region. Try it out, let us know what you think. Nathan Buggia, Live Search Marketer

First slide rule Widget ever created. This Widget contains four different types of slide rules and a tutorial for each. It also contains a history of slide rules. The Widget contains a plethora of features, some never seen before in this type of application. All this, while still looking slick and fashionable. Version History Fixed an out of bounds error