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:
I created an account at Yahoo!'s Upcoming some time ago. One of the features I like about Upcoming is that events are marked up with the hCalendar microformat. But if you subscribe to the RSS feed of your Upcoming events and include them in your blog's sidebar, all markup is lost, of course. So, I've hacked some new feature into my microformats plugin: It's now possible to subscribe to an events feed and merge this feed with the events that are manually entered via my plugin. The result is displayed in the sidebar with full hCalendar goodness. Check it out in my sidebar, and compare it with my page at upcoming.org. The plugin needs some cleanup 'cause it contains dirrrty hacks, but I will release it soon. I might also include the new and shiny wevent, a German Upcoming clone, and Google Calendar.