Ben provides some insight into a new portal. Hmmmm. I'm in agreement about Yahoo. I tend to use my weblog as my main gateway for news, but Yahoo is still the reigning king. Maybe I'll give MyWay a shot too.

MyWay.

I've been frustrated with Yahoo for a long time. I use them for my portal page: news, weather, movie listings, email, bill pay, etc. In the last 6 months, their ads have gotten downright annoying. They pop up. They slide in. They cause my whole machine to sit and wait. They take over my browser. Granted, I'm getting good, free use out of their technology but the intrusions are getting frustrating.

Today, I discovered another portal called MyWay. They bill themselves as “Yahoo without the ads”. I checked them out and sure enough, there are no ads on their site. Not one. Apparently, you can even get rid of their logo at the top of the page.

After using their site for a few minutes, I found myself feeling spooked. Something wasn't right…then it struck me. Nothing was moving. There weren't any cars driving by or servers falling or half-naked people serving beer. There weren't even any offers for cameras to spy on the women that apparently lounge sexily around my house. It was quiet. I could read the news without holding my hand to the screen to block out the blinking ads. I could ponder. I could relax and just enjoy. This is too cool!

So, I'm going to give it a shot. I'm not closing down my Yahoo account. It's just too darn useful. But, for the next week or so, I'm going to try having things MyWay. Hey, if Frank Sinatra did, why can't I?

[Ben's Blog]

Users of Chimera (aka Navigator) will want to chec ….

Users of Chimera (aka Navigator) will want to check out this page of nifty tricks and hacks. It has instructions for enabling auto-Google, customizing contextual menus, disabling disk cache, and more.

8:16 AM | Paul Bissex

[Forwarding Address: OS X]

Mail Scripts 1.3.2.  - Mail Scripts is a collection of AppleScripts for Mail and Address Book offering additional features or simplified workflow. Changes in this version include a new feature (search addresses), improvements and bug fixes. [AppleScript Info]

John, this one is dedicated to you. 

[Dilbert Daily Strip]

PHP Cookbook Ch 8: Web Basics (PDF). Web programming is probably why you’re reading this book. It’s why the first version of PHP was written and what continues to make it so popular today. PHP makes it easy to write dynamic web programs that do almost anything. Other chapters cover various PHP capabilities, like graphics, regular expressions, database access, and file I/O. These capabilities are all part of web programming, but this chapter focuses on some web-specific concepts and organizational topics that will make your web programming stronger.

“zeldman.blabra” [PHP Everywhere]

Using Amazon Web Services With PHP And SOAP. Now, your favourite language and mine, PHP, has recently started shipping with support for XML-based remote procedure calls (including SOAP) over HTTP. This makes PHP ideal for developers looking to integrate Amazon Web Services into their Web applications. The only problem? Not too many people know how to do it. That's where this tutorial comes in. Over the next few pages, I'll be demonstrating how you can use PHP, in combination with Amazon Web Services, to add powerful new capabilities to your Web applications. Take a look. – icarus

“zeldman.blsu” [PHP Everywhere]

Neatly packaged binaries for OS X.2: * Perl 5.8.0 ….

Neatly packaged binaries for OS X.2:

* Perl 5.8.0
* Apache 2.0.43
* mod_perl 1.99_07
* PHP 4.2.3
* Tomcat 4.1.12
* MySQL 3.23.52
* PostgreSQL 7.2.2
* OpenSSL Development Headers 0.9.6e
* NetInfo Administration Scripts 1.0

10:26 AM | Cory Doctorow

[Forwarding Address: OS X]