Archive for the ‘microformats’ Category

I’m POSH – are you?

Sunday, April 22nd, 2007

It seems that the core of the Microformats community finally realized that the Microformats hype grew over the small group of web developers that already produced semantic markup and wanted to add even more semantics to it. Now every Microformats fan thinks there should be a Microformat for everything instead of just asking themselves a more important question – “What’s the best semantic way to present this content?”

POSH diagram by factoryjoe
Created by factoryjoe, released under CC by-nc-sa license

That’s where POSH comes in. It stands for Plain Old Semantic HTML. POSHers promote the use of semantic use of HTML which means more than just not using tables for layout. I think that something wasn’t communicated clearly enough and that is the fact that Microformats are born out of a repeating pattern of content presentation which concerns many people and many websites. That’s one of the reasons I never pushed for any new Microformats and was more often than not annoyed by people doing just that. What good can come from a big number of formats that you can’t use because you can’t really know them all?

That said, go practice POSH, document techniques and your own solutions to problems. If some of these problems outgrow the POSH pond they might be turned into a Microformat that we can all follow. If not it’s still a great idea that you can check how other people are solving problems when you stumble upon them.

Triptracker

Saturday, October 28th, 2006

Spletne urice served its visitors a great talk from one of the founders of a Slovenian company called Klika. It’s primarily a software company that specializes in tracking software with GPS and then mapping the data to support sporting and other events (like the Ljubljana marathon that’s on tomorrow).

But the talk wasn’t about their programming but rather about the first global Slovenian Web2.0 website/service – the TripTracker. In short it’s a website that allows you to upload positional data along with pictures, matches them all up by time, draws a map and more or less creates the whole trip into a nice little presentation that you can use to show at meets or just send to your friends. It’s also a good resource for travelers that want to travel to places they know almost nothing about – you can check other people’s trips and see where they went and what they saw and see any comments they might have made.

The most fascinating thing about all this is that they created all their mapping data themselves – all the JavaScript and html for the mapping was written for this site exclusively and all the images converted from NASA sources (I hear Google has exclusive rights on HQ satellite photos so no other mapping service can use them). As the talk progressed questions were popping to my mind but were soon answered – the API is in progress, the service can use Flickr as the image resource and they might even switch their own mapping tool with Google Maps. One thing that came as a surprise is that they’re not using Microformats even though it clearly supports stuff they present on their site. They do allow export to KML though. As all true Web2.0 sites TripTracker also has a developer blog so check it out to see when they release the API to the public.

The slides will probably online soon.

Pingerator

Sunday, October 1st, 2006

Some of you might know that I’m a fan of microformats. I’ve had a few lectures here in Slovenia in our local multimedia center, I’ve done some persuading and some watching from a distance. I’ve been on the uf-discuss mailing list for some time now and on Saturday I read about this problem Andy Mabbett had with the Pingerati ping service for microformated pages – it only takes one URL per ping. This makes for a very painful resubmitting process.

Well since I was just back from a short vacation I decided to stretch my fingers and write up a small page that allows users to add multiple URLs that will get submitted to the Pingerati service one by one. It didn’t really take me much time – about an hour – and it was done. I present you the pingerator.

It’s an easy to use one page app. All you do is enter the URLs, one per line as the instruction says, and click ping! If you want to resubmit the URLs in the form you can click save and the URLs will be stored in a cookie. You can easily restore the URLs by clicking restore! The pinging is done via an iframe and you can even see the pingerati response if you toggle the visibility of the window.

I haven’t really had time to test it though so any bug reports are welcome. The application will probably be under some refurbishing in the next few days but that should not break the saved URLs or the ease of use it sports today.