My Yahoo! Blog

New: Adjustable columns are here!

Hot off the press! We are working hard to deliver more customization options and we have another one to share with you this week. (Click here if you missed the update from last week.) I’m going to introduce you to a new feature called adjustable columns. You can now specify the width of the columns in which your apps appear.

Here’s how to get started:

1. Go to your My Yahoo! page and use your cursor to hover over the space between two columns. (You will notice that the cursor will change to a slider icon.)

2. Click your mouse and the space between the columns will highlight.

3. Now move the cursor left or right and the columns on either side of the spacer will grow or shrink.

Why would you want to do this? Look at the sample I have above. The default layout has the list of links in the left-hand column, a wide center column, and a narrow right hand column. I think that the Weather app and the Today app would look better if they used less space on the page. If I had more space in the right had column, the Headlines app would appear more comprehensible and easier to read. So, let’s try it out!

After dragging the space between the two columns more to the left, I was able to make the page easier to digest… Oh yeah, this is much better!

I hope you’re enjoying these little product enhancements. Please continue to let us know how we can make your My Yahoo! better. We love to read your opinions in the comments section of this blog.

Now, go customize your page. You can add a new tab, add some new content, change your background theme, adjust the columns, and enjoy everything My Yahoo! has to offer!

Michael
- My Yahoo! Team Lead

New: Background voyeurs get see-through apps

If you are one of the many My Yahoo! users who enjoy customizing your experience, you’ve most likely chosen a theme or selected one of your Flickr photos to display in your background. If you have not had a chance to customize your page, you can learn how to do it here. We have a fun way to enjoy your background image with a new feature, “Make See-through”. In a nutshell, you simply check a box and your apps become transparent!

If you have a lot of apps on your page, you may find it difficult to see the background image clearly. See my example below… I chose a photo from my Flickr account that I took in an airplane when I was flying into Cleveland. I have always loved this shot because it reminds me of where I was born. However, the steel blue color background of the individual apps is covering up most of my picture.

To make the background of the apps transparent, click on “Change Appearance”, then “Customize Theme”, then click on the area under the label “Header” (it has copy like “Text”, “Links” and “Visited Links”). You’ll see the option to make the background see-through. Check the box. Click “I’m Done”.

The background color of all the apps has been made transparent and the background theme image will now show through. Oh yeah!

Next time, I’ll tell you about another little customization feature that should bring a little slice of joy to your My Yahoo!. Stay tuned.

Michael
- My Yahoo! Team Lead

You asked. We answered.

Last month, we continued our themes upgrade by adding the ability to upload an image or select a Flickr photo to be used as a background image (see Your Photo as Page Theme). We’re so pleased that you are enjoying the feature! Zoom! Personally, it’s great to walk around the Yahoo! office and see how many of my compatriots have personalized their My Yahoo! pages with Twilight, Hello Kitty, Star Wars and their kids dancing in fairy costumes. Stay tuned because we have more personalization goodness coming this year… Actually, this month… TEASE!

After reading through your comments on the blog, there are a few questions that I would like to answer:

1) Mike Crisler asks how to make My Yahoo! his homepage. Mike, enough people wanted to start their day with My Yahoo! that we created a simple step by step guide for setting it as your homepage. Just click here and follow the steps.

2) Dave wants to know if he can get My Yahoo! on his phone. Dave, I’d recommend starting here to find out which solution is best for your phone. I have an iPhone and use the Yahoo! app daily. I highly recommend downloading that one. Under ‘My Interests’, I can see most of the My Yahoo! apps I’ve added to my page but not all of them. We’re continuing to work on improving this.

3) Krystal, Joni and Cori can’t seem to find the image selection option. Well, it is a little bit hard to discover right now… we’ll work on that. Until then, click “Change Appearance”, then “Customize Theme”, and select either “Page Header” or “Page Background” from the little mini-page and the option to “Change Image” will be there.

4) Some of you have had trouble uploading photos… Make sure the image is the correct file format and is not greater than 256k in file size. A general rule is smaller images = smaller file size. We plan on offering some image manipulation tools in the product to make all of this easier. Look for those soon.

That’s it for now. My Yahoo! has been the #1 personalized start page since its inception and you are the ones that have made it so. Thanks for your support and we’ll keep trying to make your life a little easier to manage and a little bit better each day.

Michael
- My Yahoo! Product Lead

New: Your photo as page theme.

A few months ago, we added a Customize Colors feature to My Yahoo! that allows you to start with one of the built-in themes and make it your own by choosing colors for different parts of your page. We received a lot of great feedback on this feature, including many requests to be able to use your own images. I’m excited to announce that this week we’ve enhanced the feature to let you do just that!

To reflect its broader capabilities, we’ve renamed the feature Customize Theme. You can find it by clicking the Change Appearance button at the top of your My Yahoo! page.

Just click on the background area for either the top of the page (what we call the Page Header) or the background of the main part of the page (what we call the Page Background). In either case, you’ll see that you now have a choice of an image or a color for the background. We’ve set things up so you can either upload an image from your hard drive or pull in an image from your Flickr account, if you have one.

A couple of tips for the page header area:
• An image that isn’t too busy works best.
• The ideal image is about 150 pixels high, so you’ll be able to see most of it (a larger image will be cropped).

Please check out our detailed Tutorial and Online Help on Customizing Colors and Backgrounds to guide you through using this new feature. Please let us know what you think.

–james
My Yahoo! Product Lead

Customize how your feeds look.

Many of you write in and request that we share more tips and tricks for using My Yahoo!. So I’ll start by sharing how I customize the appearance of my feeds to my liking. I do this by using the Options feature, which you can see by clicking the wheel icon . It’s smart enough to detect the kind of feed I have and shows as many as four display options.

For some of my feeds like this one from Zappos.com, an online store, I find an Image Only display to be the most useful.

If an item catches my eye, I hover over it with my mouse to read the summary. I’ve found Image Only displays to be a great way to conserve space on my page.

For other topics, I prefer to view the summary instantly, so I’ve set my preferences accordingly. An example is my Stock Markets News feed from Yahoo! News. With this view, I can quickly catch the headlines when I’m short on time.

Go ahead and play around with the feeds you already have on your page. We’d love to hear about the tricks you use to get the most out of your page. Comment on this blog post with your tips if you want to share a tip of your own.

Eve
Yahoo! Marketing