Blosxom Microformat Plugins

Sat 01 Dec 2007

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I've been messing around recently with some ideas on adding some initial microformats support to blosxom.

Microformats are fragments of html marked up with some standardised html class names, providing a minimalist method of adding simple structured data to html pages, primarily for machine parsing (try out the firefox Operator plugin to see microformats in action). Some examples of currently defined microformats are contact details (hcard), events (hcalendar), links or bookmarks (xfolk), geolocation (geo), etc. See the main microformats website for more.

With blosxom, one simple approach is to allow microformat attributes to be defined within story metadata, and either autoappend the microformat to the story itself, or simply define the microformat in a variable for explicit inclusion in the story. So for example, if you wanted to geocode a particular story, you could just add:

Latitude: -33.717770
Longitude: 151.115886

or

meta-latitude: -33.717770
meta-longitude: 151.115886

to your story headers (depending on which metadata plugin you're using).

This is the initial approach I've taken, allowing you to attach microformats to stories with a minimum of fuss. So far, the following blosxom microformat plugins are available:

  • uf_adr_meta - adr support
  • uf_geo_meta - geo support
  • uf_hcalendar_meta - hcalendar support
  • uf_hcard_meta - hcard support
  • uf_xfolk_meta - xfolk support

Note that these are beta quality, and may well contain bugs. Feedback especially welcome from microformat gurus. There's also a lot of other ways we might like to handle or integrate microformats - this is just a useful first step.

All plugins are available in blosxom sourceforge CVS repository.

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