Chris Casciano’s Place Name Here

I didn’t want to let today go by without a post acknowledging the 2nd birthday of Microformats.org and the related community.

Thought the first year was huge for microformats, the second one has seen additional growth in all areas from format maturity, to huge growth in the community and sites using various markup constructs, to greater support from application vendors.

Here’s a recap of a few recent news items or tidbits incase you missed them.

• John Allsopp’s book on Microformats was published
• NetNewsWire 3.0 is supporting microformats thus avoiding the need for one of my earlier hacks
• Other applications like Firefox are promising support in future releases
• Sites keep adopting various formats — from new sites like Twitter [hCard, XFN & hAtom] to older standbys like LinkedIn with 9million+ hResume based profiles!

Recently I introduced the idea of adding an Atom feed to any document you want by using hAtom along with a local ‘proxy’ script to generate feeds to pages on your site that otherwise wouldn’t have them. The post seemed well received, but it didn’t feel complete to me without some code to allow people to quickly try it for themselves. So here’s the inevitable followup with an example PHP5 script to show how you can make the hAtom to Atom conversion transparent to a site visitor and add feeds to static pages or pages that otherwise don’t have a more typical Atom feed.

I previously had tackled the issue of subscribing to documents with embedded hAtom content by writing a script for NetNewsWire that used its ability to run special script subscriptions on the “client” side.

While the script works great, and I’ve got a number of feeds I watch from other sites this way as a publisher I still longed for a more “feed”-like and more universal, and less technical solution.

This afternoon I got one big leap closer to a solution I’m happy with.