Yahoo Calendar Beta Seems To Be Promising After All google has yahoo beat to the punch...

[BuffaloHelp 24]

Few and many moons ago, jlhaslip and I started to work on calendar dealing with sharing schedules publicly. In the age of mighty google calendar you might say, "so what?"

But back when I was, at least, resiting the might google from taking over my life I was still clinging to Yahoo and all things Yahoo! After all, who can resist not singing Yahoo's commercial jingle without smiling...let alone not looking like an idiot?

Well, if this isn't new at least I'm here to make a Xisto announcement--Yahoo got calendar. And it's a calendar you can embed to your website and share it like google calendar..well sort of.

Be warned that you might need to use IFRAME (eeeeuuuwwww iframe, I know).

First you'll need to "convert" to Yahoo Calendar BETA by visiting this site: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

Once you converted to Yahoo calendar with your Yahoo ID you'll notice that your calendar just become fancier than bunch of squares. The functionality is almost elementary so I will not go over. It's almost similar to how google calendar works.

But what I'm here to tell you is that maybe because it's in BETA stage (OpaQue hates, absolutely hates the word 'beta), there are things you might highly desire. Things like the shared calendar showing your Yahoo ID at the top right corner. It's almost broadcasting your email address and asking for some more spam.

Spam, anyone?

And it looks odd--the way shared calendar shows all control menu of regular Yahoo on your website. Now, mind you I am strictly talking about embedding Yahoo Calendar to a web site. With google's calendar embedding is clean and neat. With Yahoo Calendar it shows usernames, log out, Yahoo search bar, My Yahoo...all the properties of your calendar page right smack posted on a web page. I didn't like that at all.

There were ways to hide this like using CSS to move the margin in negative value, and using overflow:hide to block off unwanted areas just mentioned above (like top 76px and bottom 10px).

Overall, not bad. But still needs vast improvements. What I'd like to see from Yahoo (or any other embeddable calendars) is to be able to change colors with my own css--at least few major color schemes to match my site. Google calendar has it fixed so that you cannot escape the light blue border, ever!

Yahoo calendar is trying to win you over with Flickr integration where you can share photos within your calendar. I'm sorry, since I don't use Flickr (they are slow loading at times and it just annoys da hell out of me) so I can't comment on that. Let me know how you like it.