Glen Scott - Keeping it simple, since 1977

I have a love-hate relationship with PHP’s class repository (and answer to Perl’s CPAN), PEAR. Sometimes you can find very useful, well documented and cleanly implemented packages. And obviously re-using such components is a big-win. Sadly, the quality of PEAR varies wildly and frequently I stumble upon useful looking packages that have little or, worse, no documentation. This situation, regardless of the underlying code, puts me off more than anything.

It’s odd, as writing examples and documentation is a pre-requisite for new PEAR package submissions. The question is, should the PEAR developers be more strict on what they let in?

PEAR :: The PHP Extension and Application Repository

Today Yahoo are entering the world of Web desktops (”Webtops”) with BrowerPlus, a plugin for your browser that makes building rich applications a lot simpler.

Included is an example Flickr uploading application that allows you to drag and drop files from your desktop onto the browser.

BrowserPlus

Intelligent post from Michael Arrington on the importance of choice within the search engine world, and what can still be achieved in this area:

There are so many areas on search that remain to be conquered. Semantic search. Real language/AI search. The deep web. Media search. Today search basically returns web documents. What I want is for search to complete tasks for me. We’re no where near that today.

The Importance Of A Competitive Search Market

Inquisitor is a fantastic search add-on for Safari, and it’s recently been updated to version 3. Basically, it enhances the Safari search box by suggesting results and allowing searches on sites other than Google. Pretty essential, I would say.

Inquisitor

• Common shell script mistakes
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Tired of a list of blue links after performing a search? Yahoo! Glue is now in Beta on the India search site, and it shows how search can be enhanced by related content. An example search for “taj mahal“, for instance, pulls up Flickr pictures and a Wikipedia link along with traditional search results. Pretty neat.

Yahoo! India Search

• Home | Email Standards Project
  The Email Standards Project works with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email.
  (tags: accessibility email html technology templates tips tools web)

Yahoo search has now integrated McAfee’s SiteAdvisor into it’s search engine which means dodgy sites serving up spam and malware are flagged up:

SearchScan - Search with confidence at Yahoo!