Professional Web Developer, Apprentice Photographer
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Word from NetNewsWire developer Brent Simmons is that the next update to the great OS X feed reader will drop microformats support.
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.
Quickies! Don’t miss these.
Ethan Marcotte just posted his slides from his presentation today at An Event Apart Boston. Grab them from this post. He’s been busy, also writing Where Our Standards Went Wrong for A List Apart.
And John Allsopp wraps up links to microformat presentations given around the world by Tantek Çelik, Dmitry Baranovski and himself over at Microformatique. John too has been busy, his new book, Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 was released this week.
I’ve just updated my microformat plugin for the textpattern CMS and blogging tool. This update is a maintenance fix to add support for Textpattern v1.0.4 and some changes made in the way tag helpers are built. Users of older versions of TXP should stick with the 1.0 version of the plugin.
Michael Kaply just posted an update to his great Operator extension for Firefox. Sporting some performance and UI tweaks Operator 0.6, the plugin gives users some helpful interface tools to link microformat data in the current web page to other services like Google Maps [instantly find a Geo coordinate on a map] or Technorati [for tag lookup].
Get the Operator addon then take it for a spin around ChunkySoup.net or Place Name Here.
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.
Though I already had mentioned his recent Vitamin article John Allsopp has been quite busy the last week or so on the microformats front and deserves another mention.
Besides his article on microformat magic he also has a new article on Digital Web Magazine titled The Big Picture on Microformats covering many ways they are being used /today/ and has also just launched microformatique a new blog covering microformat happenings around the web including places like Yahoo! and ma.gnolia.
(If John’s name isn’t familiar to you it should be, he’s been in the industry forever and has been fairly visible with his work at westciv.)
Because I’ve been so quiet around these parts lately here’s a big ole list of links for the web builder in you!
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.
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.
I’m happy to announce the release of version 1.0 of my Textpattern Microformat plugin pnh_mf. This release adds support for the hReview microformat and works in a few small bug fixes. Downloads and change notes available from the pnh_mf page.
Today, June 20th, marks the 1 year anniversary of the launch of the microformats community. There’s a party planned and everything, but I’m on the wrong coast as usual so I’ll have to partake via IRC. More on the wiki.