Archive for November, 2008

Is it just me or did Thanksgiving totally sneak up on us like a stealth turkey? Having just recovered from Halloween and a very intense Election Day, I’ve now officially got turkey on my mind.

Now, if the prospect of Thanksgiving has you feeling the holiday pressure to give up the gobble, I’m here to help ease your stress with a collection of feeds that’ll cover you from turkey (and all the fixings) to Black Friday, the biggest online shopping day of the year.

If you’re looking for comfort food holiday recipes, you’ll want to check out Simply Recipes. Not only are the food photos worth an ogle, the recipes are simple, sound delicious and have even been tested by the blogger and her family.

Though Thanksgiving is the infamous holiday when you can easily eat your weight in food, Cooking Light’s recipes can help lessen the guilt. Because their recipes are light on the fat, yet heavy on flavor, you’ll still be able to enjoy your turkey, mashed potatoes, and gravy, oh my!

Thanksgiving is about family, food, and fun. You can cover all this with FamilyFun.com’s Holiday Crafts and Recipe Ideas feed. This site has a wealth of Thanksgiving ideas and content—kid-friendly crafts, recipes, decorations, and games. It’s also a super resource for Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa.

Even though AAA says fewer people will be traveling over the Thanksgiving holiday, you’ll still have to contend with 4.5 million people traveling by plane. Avoid the headache of airport delays with FlightStats’s Current Airport Delays feed.

You can stay one step ahead of Mother Nature and her holiday weather threats with
The Weather Channel’s National Weather Outlook feed.

The news doesn’t even slow down on turkey day, so stay informed of the latest Thanksgiving news and headlines with Yahoo! News’ feed.

And even though holiday gift deals are everywhere, there’s still Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year. For the latest shopping deals, you’ll want to check out Deal Catcher.com’s feed and bargain deals flagged by a community of users at Dealigg.com.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Helen
- My Yahoo! Editorial

The 0.10.3 release of Google Gadgets for Linux is out, with bug fixes and major feature enhancements. Most notably, now Linux gadgets can use most of the features introduced in the 5.8 release of Google Desktop for Windows.

If you have a previous version of Google Gadgets for Linux, we encourage you to upgrade to this version. Just download and install the binaries for your platform.

With the 0.10.3 release, gadgets can run seamlessly within KDE4's Plasma environment, as the following screenshots show. For more information on KDE4 and gadgets, see the KDE4 Plasma page in the google-gadgets-for-linux project.





Thanks for reading this, and remember to download Google Gadgets for Linux!

Posted by James Su and Kathy Walrath, Google Desktop Team

Name: VTM Wheater Map
Author: Stefan vd
Description: Show the VTM Wheater Map from Belgium.

More information | Download gadget

Each week this blog features a recently added Google Desktop gadget that looks promising. If you'd like to see all new Desktop gadgets as they're published, subscribe to the RSS feed.

Posted by Kathy Walrath, Technical Writer

At about 11AM PST today, a glitch resulted in Bloglines downtime. The team began troubleshooting immediately. Bloglines is back up and running with no data loss. We certainly apologize for any temporary inconvenience.

- Eric Engleman & The Bloglines Team

We're pleased to announce the addition of local search for China. For users already using the AJAX Search API for local search, you should now be able to search for businesses in China without having to make any changes. Try typing "hotels in Beijing" in your site or app which uses the Google AJAX Search API. You should see some results:



To take advantage of local search functionality, take a look at the AJAX Search API. The samples here are also particularly useful.

If you have any feedback or comments, please drop by our Google Group or new IRC channel (irc details can be found at the bottom of this post).

Last night's Flag & Bell IT pub crawl took us through some backstreets of Soho. We started out at the Nanobyte Pub and then moved to The Couch Bar on Dean Street.


Thanks again to TNT Magazine for sponsoring drinks at the first pub and the top quiz prize. Congratulations to Peter's team for picking the lucky slip out of the hat. I hope they have a good time watching the Australian vs Barbarians rugby match at Wembley Stadium. I hope the Aussies win :-)

For those people interested in attending TNT's IT networking night next week on Wednesday the 19th, please find all the registration information here.

Details for the Flag & Bell Christmas Party coming soon...

With only two weeks until Thanksgiving and the official kickoff of the holiday season, I have one thing on my mind…travel. I recently read several news articles about how traveling in the coming six weeks will be challenging because of fewer flights, rising airfare, and various fees. Despite all that, I’m incredibly excited to get back home and spend some time with family, and I’ve got the perfect travel agent in my My Yahoo! page.

First, I added the Travel Smart preloaded tab by Concierge.com. It’s great; now I have great tips on how to travel lighter and worry-free! Along with this travel advice, I can browse the travel blogs for warm vacation spots during the cold winter months after the holidays. Hmm…I wonder what the beaches in Oahu are like in January!

Ok, enough dreaming. What I’m really interested in is finding the lowest possible fares for holiday flights. My module of choice for this is the Yahoo! Farechase Low Fare Tracker. In just a few clicks, I can quickly find the cheapest flights and start the holiday travel planning process.

Whatever your plans are this holiday season, have safe travels and check out the Travel Smart preloaded tab to ease any travel concerns you might have!

Adam
- My Yahoo! Marketing