bioneural.net » microformats

Customizing WordPress feed content

Bruce — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 20:38:12 +0000

When I last looked at customizing feeds in WordPress, it was all to do with being able to offer a summary and full text feed simultaneously—making use of WordPress' flexible feed URL syntax and a .htaccess file. In this post I look at modifying the actual contents of the feed using a functions.php file (which may already exist as part of your current theme). Just as WordPress provides a number of hooks for adding or removing actions in your theme header (see here), so to do the core files that generate your feeds. Editing the core files is however discouraged (it makes upgrading a pain), and although you can build your own replacement feed templates an easy alternative is adding a few lines to your theme's functions.php file. As a perpetual PHP beginner I feel obliged to warn you that use of the following code is at your own risk. If there are any PHP/ WordPress experts reading this who can improve on my code please make yourself known ;-) Removing WP version info Somewhere, a while back, I read a tip about not including the WordPress version you are running in your template header—potentially allowing hackers to identify you as a target if you haven't kept up-to-date. It's easy to remove if present. For example, in the K2 theme just delete the following line from header.php: From bioneural.net:Mac-based web developers...]]> ... http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ Rendered in a feed reader humans will see this: The Creative Commons icon is hopefully recognisable and links to the correct license; the link to bioneural.net ...

RDF v microformats v meta headers

Bruce — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 18:24:49 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net :

I've had a hard time "getting" RDF (e.g. how it differs from XML), but this article helps give it context. The semantic web is being built simultaneously from the bottom up and top down. Typifying the bottom-up approach, RDF content is machine-readable at the outset; powerful but complex (with several advantages over microformats), RDF is all about inter-operability. Top-down approaches introduce "metadata sprinkling" to existing content, simple but limiting by comparison e.g. microformats (using CSS class attributes as in hCard), or meta elements (meta tags such as those for geo-discovery). Both approaches are valid, but RDF is hard whereas microformats help "the rest of us" contribute to the semantic web. There may be a collision ahead, however, between microformats and RDFa (sprinklings of RDF embedded in existing XHTML).

A web standard icon for geotagging

Bruce — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 13:35:39 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net :

Geotagging (or geocoding if you prefer) is the act of associating your content (blog posts, photos, feeds, etc.) with a geographic location (e.g. via latitude and longitude co-ordinates). Thus tagged authors can "mash" their content together with the likes of Google Maps, or the Flickr Map if photography is your thing. However, co-ordinates are typically encoded within metadata (or microformat) tags making them visible to machines but hidden from people. We have de facto web standard icons to help identify feeds, OPML, and sharing—so why not for geotagged content? Update 29.02.08: Thanks to everyone who gave feedback or otherwise contributed to the process of taking this proposal forward. Comments are now closed and further feedback should now be directed to geotagicons.com, where you can now download the new community-designed geotag icon. The goods I propose a web standard Geotag Icon, to be used freely by any geotagger or geotagging service. Here is what it looks like at 128px: At 32px: And at 16px: Important: These images are not final; this is a proposal. Please do not hotlink to these images. You can download them individually by right-clicking the one you want, or as part of the draft Geotag Icon Development Kit here. Family line-up The family resemblance is obvious: Why not complete the set? Grab the Feed icon, the OPML icon, and the Open Share icon. Update 27.03.08: The Open Share Icon Project offers a free, open, community-driven alternative to the trademarked and brand-linked ShareThis.com icon. Icon specification It should be similar in style to existing de facto web standard icons (hereafter ...

Implementing the hCard microformat

Bruce — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 11:12:23 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net :

hCard is a semantic web-friendly derivative of vCard (as used to import/ export from the Mac OS X Address Book). This post is a short "how to" describing a method for adding contact information to your blog posts in a cross-platform format that your readers can store without effort. The RSS client NetNewsWire now detects microformats—hCard/ vCard for contacts and hCalender for calendar events. I noticed that the odd site has started displaying the tell-tale icon indicating associated contact information: Adding hCard to your posts I wanted my hCard to be available from any page in my site, so I added the following code to my WordPress footer.php template: Bruce McKenzie is a General Practitioner based in Wellington, New Zealand. He blogs at bioneural.net (feed) and can be contacted (+12:00 UTC) as b.mckenzie on Skype. Notice that the paragraph containing my hCard data is styled out so that it doesn't display at the footer of my page: If CSS is disabled, however, the hCard information is revealed to the world and the use of "natural language" makes things human-readable: Tip: An easy way to encode a photo is to e-mail yourself a JPEG photo then select the message in Mail and choose View > Message > Raw source. Now copy the base64-encoded text block into the image scr, adding a "data:image/jpeg;base64," prefix. Accessing hCard via NetNewsWire At this point when readers use NetNewsWire to read one of your posts your hCard should be automatically detected, although it appears that not all of the specification is supported. They can ...

Introduction to microformats

Bruce — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 20:37:56 +0000

From http://www.bioneural.net :

Nick Nettleton summarizes: "Microformats build on the semantic capabilities of the web, using existing standards". Many bloggers use rel-tag already; read Nick's helpful intro then head to microformats.org to learn more about this "next big thing".