Now, on to the holiday feasting …

Back in October, the Envato tuts network held several contests to celebrate their 3rd anniversary. I was fortunate to win one of these contests – a sweet PS pillow from MySuiteStuff! It took a while to get, because they’re all hand made, but I’ve finally got it! Very soft and very cuddly

Kind of funny, it reminds me of a pillow I made for my buddy Eric at PixelChef Creative for his birthday in January. The craftsmanship isn’t as great as the MySuiteStuff pillow, but in my defense, it’s an odd shape that would take practice to perfect.

Lovely surprise when I opened up my browser to Yahoo! today, a brand new homepage design! I relly don’t even use Yahoo! except that I like those random bits of news on their homepage that amuse me when I first open up my browser.

While much of the content and organization of the different elements on the page remains very similar to the old, the design has been given a breath of fresh air. Below are images of the two designs side by side, click to see the full sized versions.

The new design incorporates Yahoo!’s purple colour scheme, which was introduced last year.

Even just looking at the small thumbnail, it is clear that the new design is less cluttered. Don’t get me wrong, I still find it cluttered … but at least it’s less cluttered. Opening up the line height helped significantly. It’s a subtle change that many people often overlook, but it does wonders. They’ve gotten rid of the numerous gradient uses and only used it on their search bar, which gives the search bar prominence while giving the rest of the page clarity. In addition, the “featured news” section has a new look with a larger leading image.

The long list of links to the left, is still a long list of links (did people ever really use that?). A noticeable difference though is that these links may be more relevant to the kinds of sites that people actually might use, such as Facebook, eBay, mySpace. Unfortuntely, they do still incorporate some of the Yahoo! links that I never use. I’m not sure if this functionality to remove some of these links was there before, but it certainly wasn’t prominent enough for me to know. Now, however, I can easily remove the links I don’t want right from the home page. I also get an interesting “live preview” by hovering over these links.

I’m sure if I used Yahoo! on a daily basis, I’d appreciate these changes. What are your thoughts? Anyone out there use the Yahoo! homepage?

Dear Yahoo! GeoCities customer,

We’re writing to let you know that Yahoo! GeoCities, our free web site building service and community, is closing on October 26, 2009.

On October 26, 2009, your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web, and you will no longer be able to access your GeoCities account and files.

GeoCities may not be the most glamorous thing on the web, but it is where I (and many others!) first started out. It used to be the best free web hosting space out there with the least amount of ads but the best specs. Granted, my very first website was so full of animated gifs and background music that it took forever to load, but GeoCities gave me the opportunity to learn and grow as a web designer. It gave me a place to discover what HTML was, allowed me to experiment.

I haven’t used GeoCities for many many years, but it surely will be missed. I am saddened by the fact that others will not be able to use its services to grow as I have.