Advocacy email samples

To help with the advocacy of microformats, when you successfully convince a site owner/developer to adopt microformats, please consider sharing the email you sent here so that others in the community can leverage your experience and success and re-use your work in further advocacy with additional sites.

You may wish to reword your email sample in some form of template form, e.g. Dear SITEOWNER, your SITENAME <SITEURL> could benefit from microformats... Use ALLCAPS to indicate text that should be replaced with specific site instance information.

Please be sure to list who you've contacted on advocacy, so that we don't all contact the same people!

Samples

Add hCard to your contact info page

sample email 1

Hi SITEOWNER,

I like to get folks started with a really simple really easy and quick win use of microformats to get something done quickly for experience etc.

See if you can add hCard to your SITENAME contact info page:

SITECONTACTINFOURL

And add an "Add to Address Book" link as well.

http://h2vx.com/vcf/SITECONTACTINFOURL

When you've successfully done so, go ahead and ping http://pingerati.net/ with the contact info page URL once you have updated it with hCard so that it can be indexed by event search engines.

http://pingerati.net/ping/SITECONTACTINFOURL

And add your contact page to the list of examples in the wild here:

http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-examples-in-wild

Thanks,

sample email 2

Your contact info page is a prime candidate for adding hCard for better indexing and making it easier for your users to add you to their address books.

The following document will walk you thru adding hCard to your contact page:

http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-authoring

We are also very much interested in hearing your feedback about that document, and about any difficulties or challenges you may encounter while adding hCard support to your document. Please let me know.

Thanks,

Add hCalendar to your event

Hi SITEOWNER,

Please consider marking-up the event information on your event page with hCalendar:

http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar

And add an "Subscribe to Events" link as well.

E.g. take a look at how BarCamp's site works (view source) with the "Subscribe..." link in the sidebar:

http://barcamp.org/

webcal://h2vx.com/ics/SITEEVENTINFOURL

When you've successfully done so, go ahead and ping http://pingerati.net/ with your event page URL once you have updated it with hCalendar so that it can be indexed by event search engines.

http://pingerati.net/ping/SITEEVENTINFOURL

And add your event info page to the list of examples in the wild here:

http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar-examples-in-wild

Thanks,

Add hCard to venues hCalendar to events

Hi SITEOWNER,

It would be great if SITENAME venue listings supported the hCard microformat so that users could easily add them to their address books.

http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard

In addition, it would be great if SITENAME reservations (both what's available and confirmed) supported the hCalendar microformat so users could easily add them to their calendar programs.

http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar

For more information on microformats, check out:

http://microformats.org/

Thanks and I hope this email finds you well.

Add XFN to social network profiles

Hi SITEOWNER,

Have you heard of XFN? (http://www.gmpg.org/xfn/) It's a widely adopted open standard (Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and many more use it). It's a way of stating personal relationships in HTML links, so on my profile page where you list my contacts, they can be marked as contacts in standard way that computers can understand. This allows me to use other sites and add the same friends automatically!

It also works the other way, when people sign up to your site you could ask them for the address of their profiles on other sites and find any of their friends who are already members of yours (have a look at Google Social Graph API).

For information on other formats that can make your site even more useful check out http://microformats.org/.

Thanks.

Geo 1

Hello, SITEOWNER,

Please consider using the "geo" microformat:

http://microformats.org/wiki/geo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geo_%28microformat%29

for marking up your WGS84 co-ordinates [OR WAYPOINTS, OR SOME OTHER TERM AS APPROPRIATE]. That would allow people with the relevant tools, such as the "Operator" extension in FireFox, to visit any of them in their favourite mapping tool, or for other parsers to access them semi-automatically or upload them to a GPS unit.

For example, on:

PAGE URL

your mark-up (simplified; wrapped for clarity):

MARK-UP FROM PAGE

would simply become:

MARK-UP WITH ADDED GEO MICROFORMAT

You can use other elements than span.

You can also use this button (please download a copy, rather than linking to this URL):

http://rbach.priv.at/2006/buttons/geo.png

on each page, to indicate the presence of a Geo microformat. You could even link it to one of the above URLs, too; but neither is mandatory.

I'm happy to advise further, or look at test pages.

Please feel free to pass this e-mail to other interested parties.

RSVP

Geo 2

AS ABOVE, BUT IF THE SITE USES SOUTHINGS/ WESTINGS OR DEGREES-MINUTES-SECONDS, WITH:

For Southern and Western co-ordinates, "geo" requires negative values, so:

34°S 58°W

would become:

<span class="geo">

<abbr class="latitude" title="-34">34°S</abbr>

<abbr class="longitude" title="-58">58°W</abbr>

</span>

note that "title" is only recognized on the "abbr" element.

See also

• advocacy