who flicked the switch?

Looks like Yahoo! switched on the "new" calendar.

The good news is that it is based on the iCalendar standard; the bad news is that all kinds of things broke.

My desktop Yahoo!Widget which displayed my astronomy Yahoo!Calendar broke. Couldn't move forwards or backwards. Then I closed it and reopened it, in hopes it was just hung. Now it won't even open.

Tried access the calendar from my browser to edit it... Got a scary message: "The Yahoo! user nouser does not exist or does not have a public Yahoo! Calendar." That sent a chill down my spine thinking all the data had been deleted. After logging in directly (in a different browser), I saw all the data intact (whew!) but in the new (not beta anymore) format. Mmmm. Oh oh!

Jumped into the companion site and pulled up the what's up page... Yep. The iFrame panel showed the same nouser message. Damn it. I reviewed the sharing options and found how to share publicly. Longer, more convulted link. But, in short order, I had the iFrame calendar working again.

The old calendar supported categories. There were about 20. The Day Planner Yahoo!Widget supported 4 of them and showed them with different colours. That's all gone now. There's a new feature called stickers, whatever that means. The birthday category has been converted to the birthday sticker. But probably the best thing to do now is use iCalendar layer feature.

The Yahoo!Widget though... I bet that one's a dead-end. Sadly, no one's doing widget development.

And that's the crux of the matter. I really liked the little Day Planner! It was extremely helpful for keeping me on top of upcoming events. It was, on the desktop of my main computer, in my face. Without it, I don't know what I'm gonna do.

Sent an email to Yahoo! customer service...