Microformats

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Microformateers: Quick Microformats Support

October 25, 2009 in Microformats by Carsten Pötter

Microformats are really cool. Small snippets of code that semantically describe various information included in any published text on the web. It’s not visible information for end-users but rather metadata that can be crawled and parsed by search engines or extracted by other means, like browser add-ons.

While microformats are rather simple – even I understand most of them – there might be use cases where coders unfamiliar with them run into problems, have questions about proper implementation or need some other information they can’t find elsewhere on the web. They need help. Quickly. Microformateers come to the rescue.

Microformateers is simply a Twitter account run by people who know microformats inside out. Some are even authors of various microformats. Among them are usual suspects like Kevin Marks and Tantek Çelik but also fellow German Matthias Pfefferle. They provide quick support for those who need it.

I think Micoformateers is a great concept. It provides a low-threshold service, is quick and doesn’t need any resources other than the people’s time involved with it. Probably not all problems can be solved by Twitter but it’s good enough for small hints or a link for further reading that make life of coders easier. Well done!

Tags: Kevin Marks, Matthias Pfefferle, Microformateers, Microformats, Tantek Celik, Twitter

MyBlogLog Features hCards

April 25, 2008 in Microformats, Open Standards by Carsten Pötter | View Comments

MyBlogLog continues to impress advocates of open standards. After rolling out microformats like <rel="tag"> and XFN, MicroID, and FOAF it announced the addition of hCards and vCards to the profiles of its users last night.

vCards and hCards

Profiles feature two new icons now: one for vCards and one for hCards:

Clicking the vCard icon (that’s the left one), the vCard can be downloaded to a computer and added to a user’s favourite address book. Clicking the hCard icon, a separate page is displaying profile information:

mybloglog hcard

Privacy Settings

People having a MyBlogLog account know that they can add rather private information like their telephone number to their profiles. Though they can decide if this information is publicly viewable, only by their contacts or by nobody. MyBlogLog has added those privacy settings to the hCard and vCard information as well. So if users decide their telephone number is only available to their contacts, other people can’t access that information by hCard or vCard. The same applies for services which parse hCards.

That’s actually pretty cool because this is the first service I am aware of that offers granular privacy settings for hCards. I am sure that this implementation also helps reducing fears that contact information will be widely available on the web without users’ consent.

Well done!

Related?

April 23, 2008 in Data Portability, Microformats, Open Standards by Carsten Pötter

You decide.

Mahalo has rolled out support for microformats. [via notizBlog, via Sean Percival]
The DataPortability group has chosen a new logo and is six months old by now. Congrats! [via Mr Topf]
While FeedDemon supports it since a few months already, Newsgator Online is also supporting APML now. [via Read/Write Web]

Ha, just ordered some CDs directly from Dischord Records – couldn’t resist with Dollar/Euro exchange rates we have these days – and realized that they have the hCard and adr microformats on their site. They could markup bands with hCards as well, though. Nevertheless good to see.

March 25, 2008 by Carsten Pötter | View Comments

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