Category: News

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.

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?

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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!

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Steve Martin has an hCard

Steve Martin, the Steve Martin– comedian and actor- has an hCard.

Tantek points out, towards the end of this post that the web designers responsible for stevemartin.com were at An Event Apart NY and took up Tantek’s challenge to add an hCard to their sites.

Go check out the the hCard and add it to your address book.

I can’t guarantee that this well help you make it big in Hollywood, but it couldn’t hurt!

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Thanks for a wonderful Birthday Party!

Thanks once again for all your help in pulling together a smashing public celebration of the first year of Microformats.org — in less than a week!

Based on the drink ticket and badge counts (and dozens of photos on flickr), between 125-150 participants joined us to kick off a very successful week for the microformats community at MashPit, Wharton West, Supernova, and BarCamp. We saw at least two major announcements: Y! Local adding 10M+ hCards and hReviews, and ~500K hListings from Edgeio.

t-shirt modeling in an elevator by Rohit and Tantek

Another sign of our momentum was raising $5,250 in sponsorship on such short notice. The proceeds went towards several event costs, subsidizing T-shirts, and reserves for the future — stay tuned for a reissue of the classic wallet magnifier cards…

While Tantek and Chris deserve all credit for initiating the event and soliciting sponsors; and both Ryan King and Tara Hunt helped immensely on the spot, I cannot say enough about how effective Sonya Schaefer (CommerceNet’s interim marketing leader) was in making this actually happen.

micro-dessert buffet

She scrambled to scout out a venue, negotiated down the fee from thousands to free, made sure there was entertainment and flowers, and easily halved our catering budget by purchasing, transporting, presenting, and decorating our “micro-food” dessert buffet herself! I was out of town much of that week, so I can testify that it simply would not have come together as professionally as it did without her.

Thanks again to all of you, all of our sponsors, and most of all, our supporters, advocates, and developers — the microformats.org community that’s going to lead one of the most dramatic technology adoption ramps on the Web since blogging!

Lead Sponsor:
Microsoft
Sponsors:
CommerceNet, Technorati, Yahoo!
Supporters:
Automattic, Citizen Agency, Supernova

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