advocacy-email-samples

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!

Contributors

• Tantek Çelik
• Andy Mabbett

Samples

Add hCard to your contact info page

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.

E.g. take a look at how Technorati's contact info page works (view source) with the "Add to Address Book" link.

http://technorati.com/about/contact.html

http://feeds.technorati.com/contacts/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,

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://feeds.technorati.com/events/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,

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 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 recognised on the "abbr" element.