My Yahoo! Blog

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

New: Create your own page colors.

By popular request, you can now customize the colors for the header, background, and text on your My Yahoo! page. You can find this new feature under the Change Appearance menu on the upper left hand side of the page. Once there, you will see a link to Customize Colors. You’ll see two visual sections like the ones represented below.

By clicking on different areas of the first section you can highlight four different areas of your page to customize. The four areas include the header, sub-header, page background, and content area. Depending which area you select, you can see associated customize options available for that particular section on the right hand side.

A good tip to keep in mind is to choose background and text colors that have good contrast in relation to each other, so that the content remains legible. The best way to see how it works is to give it a try. It’s pretty intuitive once you start using it. At any time, you can change the color back to the original color you started with by clicking the Reset link that is shown next to the I’m Done button.

You can create 9 custom themes of your own. As you create new custom page colors, you can find your colors added to the list of Custom Themes available when you return to the Change Appearance Menu.

This feature is in beta and we’d love to hear your feedback. Go ahead, make your My Yahoo! page as unique as you are.

John
Product Manager

Lots of modules? No problem!

It’s time to acknowledge my problem: I’m an information junky. Whether it’s scanning news headlines or mainlining my 99 favorite blogs, I am all over the Internet, all the time. It’s not healthy.

For the sake of my own sanity, I’ve been craving a way to keep all these sites in one place, but organized into different categories. This way, I could find what I need, when I wanted, without heavy searching or bookmarking.

I took a bold step towards that goal when I started using multiple pages on My Yahoo!. Now, I can keep all of my everyday content on the “My Front Page,” and I can categorize my favorite blogs in the extra pages (yes, like the newspaper!).

To add another page to your My Yahoo!, click on the “Add Page” button in the navigation bar just below the Search box.

You can personalize your new page too…

* Add modules and change the color and layout of your page
* Move modules between pages by dragging and dropping them onto the page name
* Rename your new page at any time by clicking on the page name

Adding another page – or even several pages – is such a quick and simple way to keep all your content organized. And if you’re a media obsessive like me, that can mean the difference between a data death spiral and information Nirvana. Try it out!

–Eric
My Yahoo! Sr. Product Manager

Improved: Inside My Yahoo!.

Ever get tired of having the same old content sources on your page, day after day? Consider adding Inside My Yahoo!, which brings you a daily content suggestion. Our editors comb through the millions of feeds (so you don’t have to). Oh, and occasionally we’ll add tips and updates from the product team, just to keep you in the know.

What’s add RSS by URL?

Here’s a tip for those of you not familiar with RSS and feeds. RSS is a format for distributing and gathering content from sources across the Web that is easily read through a reader like My Yahoo!. So next time you happen upon a site that you might like to check on occasion, give it a try.

Add an RSS feed from the site to your page:
• Follow the instructions on the site to locate the feed URL (look for the RSS icon) and copy it.
• In My Yahoo!, go to Personalize this page > Content: Add RSS Feed > Paste the URL and click Add.

The content will be added to the top left of your page.