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!

Jon Hicks has taken the idea of client side style sheets to highlight microformats that I implemented in my NNW Extract Microformats tool and ran with it. He’s cleaned up the presentation and made a user style sheet that you can use in most any mac browser—like Camino, Safari and OmniWeb (though the idea works in most other browsers as well). Combine the detection of microformats on the page via these style sheets with some bookmarklets (also provided) and you have a simple system for grabbing hcards or hcalendar events from any web site.

I’m pleased to announce the release of my latest little hack for adding microformats support to NetNewsWire (not lite)—Extract Microformats v0.5.

This little script is actually a combination of theme files (css) and applescript to bring a bookmarklet like option that uses Technorati’s microformat services to save hCard or hCalendar data found in the content of feed items. After installation (just copying some files) saving events or contact data is as easy as 1, 2, 3… er… 4.