The new Yahoo! News Beta is out!

We’ve been working on this for a long time and it’s great to finally let the world see it. It’s got some great stuff that I’ve been thinking about ever since I joined the Y! News team 3 years ago. It has bigger pictures, a cleaner look, IM story to a friend, and My Sources on the front page – a sort of “News RSS for Dummies”.

You can finally autoplay slideshows. Just click the play button and sit back. If you like to scan headlines, you’ll love the tabbed views on the front page. The Y!Q contextual links on each story are pretty cool as well.

Under the hood, we’ve killed every font tag and table. It’s all PHP generating semantic markup. Thanks to the magic of mod_rewrite, you’ll automatically go back to the beta.news site if you select the “Go There” link in the yellow box on any page on news.yahoo.com. So even if you use My Yahoo, you’ll always get to experience the new news after you’ve selected it once. URLs are generally a LOT shorter too.

The “rate this story” widgets are much prettier. They don’t force you to view a new page. You can also rate from photos and slideshows. *

We’ve also implemented some nice passive personalization. Little options like the last tabs you selected on the front page, your slideshow speed preference and your preferred view – Headlines Only or Headlines and Summaries on lists of stories are all sticky. Set them once and when you come back it’ll stay that way.

There’s still much to clean up, optimize and finish. I’m a little too tired to write much more, so please check it out and let me know what you think. Here’s the formal tour.

* I learned something here about HTTP, specifically the HTTP 204 response code. It says “I got your request and did something OK, but I don’t need to send you any data back”. It’s really handy for stuff like this. In the past I always changed the location of a hidden image, hidden frame or used flash or XMLHttpRequest. This method is dead simple and has been there forever.