Working with Microformats

Microformats are wonderful. They are rather easy to understand and they don’t reinvent the wheel but rather built upon existing standards. Profiles can be marked up as hCards (which are identical to vCards you probably know from Outlook and the Mac Address Book, by the way) so they can be exported to address books; friends and contacts can be linked with XFN (hey, you’re own social network), and you can even export calendar entries to your favourite calendar application like 30 Boxes and Google Calendar, provided those entries are marked up as hCalendar, of course.

Some other well-known microformats include:

• hResume – resumes, of course
• hReview – reviews
• rel-tag – tags and categories
• hAtom – content syndication, e.g. on blogs

A few months ago I linked to a few examples of hCard implementations, this time I concentrate on tools, instructions, plugins,… which could help users to detect and implement microformats.

1. Bowser plugins and bookmarklets
• Operator: Well-known plugin for Firefox; detects and exports various microformats
• Tails: Another plugin for Firefox; similar to Operator and worth checking out
• Carnival: Parser for Safari, detects hCards
• Leftlogic bookmarklet: It detects hCards and hCalendar entries; works with Firefox, Safari, and IE
• Maxthon plugin: Microformats plugin for the Maxthon browser
• Highlight Microformats bookmarklet (mentioned in the comments by Martin): Bookmarklet for Safari, Camino, and Omniweb which highlights hCards and hCalendar
2. WordPress
• Plaintxt.org: Some very nice themes, all marked up with microformats (hCard, hAtom)
• hCard About box widget: Adds an About box to the sidebar of widgetized themes
• Tutorial on adding microformats to WordPress themes: Very good tutorial demonstrating how to add hAtom, hCard, adr, and xFolk
3. Miscellaneous
• vCard to hCard Converter: Converts… yep, correct
• Resolio: Easily create resumes with hResume
• Timeline Generator: Creates a timeline out of hCalender entries
• Technorati Kitchen: Search engine for microformats
• Brian Suda’s cheat sheet: If you want to implement microformats yourself

If you know good instructions or plugins for other CMS like Textpattern, Drupal, Serendipity,… leave a comment, please. I am sure there are some but I am really unfamiliar with those systems.