Archive for November, 2008

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

We are happy to announce the release of voice and video chat in Gmail. Now you can chat in high quality audio and video with your Google Talk contacts from Gmail. Check out the details on the Gmail blog and the Official Google blog.

Serge Lachapelle
Product Manager, Stockholm

Join members of the Internet Explorer team for the last  Expert Zone chat  of 2008 this Thursday, November 13^th at 10.00 PST/18.00 UTC. These chats are a great opportunity to have your questions answered by members of the IE product team.

Thank you to all who have attended the chats through the year! Look for us to start these chats up again in January 2009. If you can’t join us online, all chat transcripts are published here.

Kristen Kibble
Program Manager

P.S. Upcoming IE chat dates are posted here.

Edit: Refreshed the links in the post and adjusted the UTC time.

If you're a Flash nut then you probably know about the SWFObject Javascript library. I'm not, so I didn't. However, since I promised myself I would play with Flex soon I am very happy that a "Flasher" suggested that we add it to our AJAX Libraries API. I took a look at it and found out that it's a great little must-have library!

See, embedding a Flash video on a page is actually more complicated than it should be. You can't just throw a tag on the page with some attributes and expect it to work. In fact, to embed a Flash file there are different methods for different browsers such as using an <embed> vs. <object> as well as setting the parameters for the file.

The SWFObject library simplifies the process so that all you need to worry about is including their Javascript library and using a single method to embed your Flash on the page in a safe, cross-browser manner. It also has a few extra utility functions, such as setting a load event for the Flash object and detecting the user's Flash version.

Because this library is open source, extremely popular, and so handy, we have added it to our AJAX Libraries API so that our caching benefits can be reaped. If you want to express your extreme happiness then you can do so in our new IRC channel:
server: irc.freenode.net
channel: #googleajaxapis
http://www.mibbit.com/?server=irc.freenode.net&channel=%23googleajaxapis