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Upcoming, hCalendar, and this blog

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.

Microformats in IE8

Several sources report that Microsoft will add microformats support to the next version of their internet browser, IE8. The corresponding IEBlog entry doesn't mention microformats, though, so this news still needs confirmation. Anyway, it would be great if microformats gained support from the two major browsers. The upcoming Firefox 3 "Gran Paradiso" will also support microformats, but there is still a discussion going on how microformats will eventually be displayed (sidebar, layers, icons).

Wikipedia now supports the geo microformat

Andy Mabbett recently added the geo microformat to Wikipedia's template system. Consequently, all Wikipedia pages that are based on this template do from now on contain geo. What's the benefit of all this? You might, for example, use the Operator or Webcards Firefox extensions to find a place in Google Maps or Yahoo! Maps with a single click. Other applications may parse a Wikipedia article and process the metadata in other ways. Examples: List of impact craters on Earth, Hamstead railway station.

Andy is a member of the WikiProject Microformats, a group of users who want to actively promote the use of microformats in the world's greates encyclopedia. Great job!

More Microformats Goodness For Your S9Y

To cut a long story short: After lots of hours of work I just committed a new version of my microformats plugin with lots of new features and bugfixes to CVS. Should be available through Spartacus soon. See my newly set up documentation page for more info. I need to go to bed now, but I promise that I will soon post more on this beautiful little plugin ;-)

hCard-GoogleMaps-Mashup

Microformats gain momentum, slowly (maybe more slowly than expected) but steadily. Now Christian Heilmann created a mashup of hCard and Google Maps aptly called hcard2gmap. The javascript parses a web page for hCards with geo information and relays these data to Google Maps where the contacts are being displayed by markers. Great stuff, more applications like this, please! Check out the demo here.