Sperrobjekt Weblog

First, there was Optimus, now Glenn Jones at lab.backnetwork brings us ufXtract, another online Microformats parser. It was created with a specific goal in mind, namely in order to help explore the real world issues of creating portable social networks. So, for a start, ufXtract's main focus seems to be a set of Microformats related to social networking: hCard and XFN, rel-me, rel-next, and hAtom; but it can detect many others as well, even the quite complex hResume. Output formats comprise plain text, XML, and JSON. ufXtract is written in C# and seems to be pretty fast, although I cannot really compare its performance to that of Optimus.

I think this is great work by Glenn, and I'm curious about the demos he is going to add. Go ahead and check it out yourself, or click on one of the following links to see some demo output of this blog's contents:

• JSON output of this blog's hAtom/hEntry
• XML output of this blog's hCalendar
• List of this blog's tags

I couldn't hardly belive it myself, but after choosing a template for this blog, I had forgotten to attach the hAtom microformat to it. I've just rectified this embarassing situation. Refurbishing my blog has taken me only five minutes this morning. A quick look at the hAtom cheatsheet helped me somewhat. Adding the appropriate classes and rel-bookmark has been a piece of cake. Actually, template designers should catch up on microformats and include hAtom by default.