O’Reilly has published an eBook, Microformats Shortcuts, written by Brian Suda.
It’s 56 pages and $9.99 (USD). Get yourself a copy (in PDF) over at the O’Reilly site.
Month: September 2006
Ryan MicroPicnic
Brighton, on the 8th September, was host to d.Construct – a one day grass-roots web development conference.
During the day, Jeremy Keith organised a rather spontaneous picnic in a nearby park to discuss Microformats. The sunny weather encouraged a very large group of attendees to listen to the session about Microformats, uses and tools – including those not directly connected to the conference (whether the passers-by thought it was an organised cult meet-up or not we may never know but the twinkling Indian music eminating from further into the park certainly gave it a mystical air)!
Again, another successful event where Microformats took a spotlight.
Don’t forget, if you have an interest in speaking to people out there in the real world about Microformats, would like to see a presentation, or have one of your own coming up – use the events list on the wiki.
Frances Publishing Microformats in WordPress
There’s a number of ways to publish microformats in WordPress. Some of us write most of the markup by hand, but that’s because we’re a bit crazy. If you’d prefer easier ways to publish microformatted content, there’s a very informative post on the Blog Helper blog about all the ways to use microformats in WordPress. Check it out.
There’s another tools I ran across recently (but haven’t had a chance to try) called HappyPals. It helps to annotated links in your posts with XFN values. As I said, I haven’t had a chance to try this yet, but it looks promising. Has anyone tried it?
Are there any other tools worth using in WordPress?
Microformats at BarCampLondon
The 2nd and 3rd of September saw the first BarCamp event in the UK, held at Yahoo! HQ in London.
Participants came from all areas of technology and web development, but the local Microformateers were in attendance and created a mini-track on the second day with 3 back-to-back presentations.
The first was my own and consisted of a brief introduction to Microformats, what they are, and how they should be used. Most of the session was discussion based and allowed those new to Microformats to air their confusions and also lead nicely into the pros and cons plus Microformats versus other technologies. Jeremy Keith was especially vocal and was a great help during this session.
Following this, Glenn Jones took over with a more indepth look at a specific use of Microformats in the d.Construct backnetwork. He showed the attendees around the implementations, and also shared his experiences with Microformats and building an application that was build around them rather than including them as an after thought.
Finally Drew Mclellan stepped in with “Parsing Microformats – Publishing is for Wimps”. This presentation, as the name suggests, discussed the difficulties in parsing Microformats and explanation of some tools that do this – and more specifically a look at the code in his hKit which is his own parser built in PHP5.
The weekend was a real success story for Microformats with many attendees having never encountered them before BarCamp but leaving with the knowledge, enthusiasm and intent to incorporate them into their own builds!