Microformats book review

Simon Schoeters <div class="hreview"> <div class="item" style="display: inline"> <a href="http://microformatique.com/book/" class="fn url">Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0</a> </div> <p class="summary" style="display: inline">is a clear and easily written introduction to microformats and semantic HTML for beginners and a solid reference work for advanced microformat users.</p> <div class="description"> <p>‘Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0’, written by <span class="vcard"><a class="url fn ext" href="http://johnfallsopp.com/">John Allsopp</a></span>, or the very first book on <a href="http://microformats.org/" class="ext">microformats</a> and I finally got my copy!</p> <p>As I played with microformats before and am familiar with the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web" title="Semantic web article on Wikipedia" class="ext">semantic web</a> idea not all concepts in the book were as useful as others but I would still recommend the book to more experienced web developers. Normally I'm not an IT book minded guy, these things tend to get hopelessly out of date before you find the time to read it and especially with microformats, a quite new concept to the web with lots of draft specifications, the book seems a dangerous field when you want to write something that lasts.</p> <p>With John Allsop's book this is exactly the reason why I bought it in the first place (except from the very reasonable £17, around €24, price tag). It's a trustworthy reference on my desk when I see a possible microformat candidate popping up in my <abbr title="Hypertext Markup Language">HTML</abbr> code. With the examples you find around the web there is always that ‘is this really the right way?’ question. With a book you know that at least someone read the specifications (as John claims in his book) before writing something down. Especially when your technical editor is a guy like <span class="vcard"><a class="url fn ext" href="http://suda.co.uk/" rel="met">Brian Suda</a></span> and you have a chance to interview <span class="vcard"><a class="url fn ext" href="http://www.simplebits.com/">Dan Cederholm</a></span>! By the way, did you know you can markup multi-dimensional tables in HTML? I didn't...</p> <p>Not only very clear for both technical and non-technical readers but John's ‘microformats and paving the cowpaths’ comparison is definitely the most beautiful microformats definition I heard.</p> <p>I would rate it <abbr title="4" class="rating">4</abbr> out of 5 stars. I need a complete hReview post for this one, don't I?</p> <h3>Book references</h3> <dl> <dt>Author</dt> <dd>John Allsopp</dd> <dt>ISBN-10</dt> <dd>1590598148</dd> <dt>ISBN-13</dt> <dd>978-1590598146</dd> <dt>Buy</dt> <dd><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1590598148?ie=UTF8&tag=suffix-21&link_code=as3&camp=2506&creative=9298&creativeASIN=1590598148" title="Get this book at Amazon">Amazon</a></dd> </dl> </div> <p class="hidden"><a rel="tag" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/book">Book</a> <span>product</span> reviewed on <abbr class="dtreviewed" title="20071024">October 24th, 2007</abbr> by <span class="reviewer vcard"><span class="fn">Simon Schoeters</span></span> as hReview (version <span class="version">0.3</span>).</p> </div>

2007-10-24T22:35:46+02:00

microformats-book Microformats book review

2009-02-25T20:15:26+01:00

Simon Schoeters <p>Only 3 days ago we launched the first version of <a href="http://www.milkcarton.be/apps/lustro" title="Lustro, export your Address Book contacts" class="ext">Lustro</a>. It took us a week between the beta testing and the final release and we fixed and enhanced quite a few things. Lustro is our little Mac OS X Leopard app to export your Address Book contacts to <abbr title="Comma-separated values">CSV</abbr>, tab delimited, hCards and Google Contacts.</p> <h3>Google Contacts export</h3> <p>A few months back making an application that exports your Address Book contacts to GMail sounded like a useful idea. Little the we know that Apple was working on the same thing. A few weeks before we released the beta version Apple came out with their built-in Address Book to Google Contacts export with the release of <a href="http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1141" class="ext" title="About the Mac OS X 10.5.3 Update">Mac OS X 10.5.3</a>. We are not good enough to beat Apple... not yet.</p> <p>We decided to keep the Google export in Lustro for the following reason (copied from the Lustro Help):</p> <blockquote>“Address Book also synchronizes with MobileMe, Exchange, Yahoo! and Google if you enable this in the preferences. Lustro still includes the Google Contacts export as the Address Book syncing only works if you have connected an iPhone or iPod Touch before and the syncing mechanism is not perfect at the time of writing (e.g. company cards show an empty name in the GMail contacts list).”</blockquote> <p>So there are a few smaller reasons why you would still use Lustro today, maybe we can add the photo export in the next release as Apple skipped that one as well.</p> <h3>hCard exports</h3> <p>The other mayor feature are the <a href="http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard" title="hCard - Microformats wiki" class="ext">hCard</a> exports. We couldn't find any hCard exporters for Apple so why not include it? We got some indirect feedback from <span class="vcard"><a href="http://flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe/2625201023/" class="fn ext">Chris Messina</a>, <span class="vcard"><a href="http://flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe/2625201023/comment72157605921180862/" class="fn ext">Brian Suda</a></span>, <span class="vcard"><a href="http://flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe/2625201023/comment72157605908401795/" class="fn ext">Tantek Çelik</a></span>, <span class="vcard"><a href="http://microformatique.com/?p=263" class="fn ext">John Allsopp</a></span> and <span class="vcard"><a href="http://ma.gnolia.com/people/adactio/bookmarks/scucuwumuch" class="fn ext">Jeremy Keith</a>, whow, I'm impressed! In the end I think we released Lustro a little too late for the GMail export thing, the buzz was over and lots of GMail exporters started to pop-up but the hCard export made up for that one.</p> <p><span class="vcard"><a href="http://flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe/2625201023/comment72157605921180862/" class="fn ext">Brian Suda</a></span>'s idea for a distributed hCard export sounds great. I don't think it fits in Lustro as it's the opposite way but I can see an Address Book plugin that ‘subscribes’ on hCard enabled webpages.</p>

2008-07-03T20:02:40+02:00

lustro-out-now Lustro on the streets

2009-02-21T22:09:25+01:00

Simon Schoeters <h3>The Urban Web</h3> <p><span class="vcard"><a class="url fn ext" href="http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/">Steven Johnson</a></span> opened <a href="http://2008.dconstruct.org/" class="ext" title="dConstruct 2008: Designing the social web">dConstruct 2008</a> with the interesting story of Dr. <span class="vcard"><span class="fn">John Snow</span></span>. Snow created a map showing the clusters of cholera cases in the <abbr class="geo" title="51.514035;-0.134634">London</abbr> epidemic of <abbr title="1854">1854</abbr>. By doing so he proved that cholera wasn't spread by smell like people thought but the water from a contaminated pump on Broad Street. Snow showed how data visualization can suddenly reveal useful information that wasn't visible before. Johnson called Snow's map the ‘first mashup’ which sounded like a nice tribute to what Snow's discovery meant to the world.</p> <p>Johnson explained how is trying to map local news from different sources with his <a href="http://outside.in/" title="Tracking news, views, and conversations in towns and neighborhoods">outside.in</a> project. While the idea sounds great and the screenshots looked good I'm not really convinced yet. Sure, this may work fine in <abbr class="geo" title="40.728333;-73.994167">Manhattan</abbr> or <abbr class="geo" title="37.429167;-122.138056">Palo Alto</abbr> but not everyone writes in English. Even when they do you'll still need that ‘critical mass’ in order to collect something useful. They also did some research to find the ‘blogiest’ neighborhoods in the <abbr class="geo" title="38.883333;-77.016667">United States</abbr>, a great idea which I would like to try in <abbr class="geo" title="50.9;4.533333">Belgium</abbr> as well.</p> <h3>Playing the Web</h3> <p><span class="vcard"><a class="url fn ext" href="http://www.toastkid.com/">Aleks Krotoski</a></span> tried to bring the game industry and webdesign world closer together. Aleks has an incredible enthusiasm but for me the topic wasn't that interesting and I felt it missed a story line.</p> <h3>Leveraging Cognitive Bias in Social Design</h3> <p><span class="vcard"><a class="url fn ext" href="http://bokardo.com/">Joshua Porter</a></span> went on with social biases and heuristics: how a language can influence decisions or advanced psychology for webdesigners. For example: people tend to be more afraid of loosing something than winning, known as the ‘loss aversion’ or how people often do and believe things because many other people do, the ‘bandwagon effect’. Porter referred to a paper which I'm planning to read at some point: “<a href="http://books.google.be/books?id=_0H8gwj4a1MC" class="ext" title="Preview this book in Google Book Search">Judgement under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases</a>”. An interesting topic but it could use some of the enthusiasm Aleks had in her presentation.</p> <h3>Designing for Interaction</h3> <p><span class="vcard"><a class="url fn ext" href="http://www.deltatangobravo.com/">Daniel Burka</a></span>, the creative director at Digg and on of the founders of Pownce, spoke about the ‘cohesive user experience’ or how Digg tried to allow users to participate on the site without requiring them to follow a lengthy signup process. Nice to have a little insight in the development process behind a huge site like Digg.</p> <h3>Social Network Portability</h3> <p><span class="vcard"><a class="url fn ext" href="http://www.tantek.com/">Tantek Çelik</a></span> followed with his <a href="http://microformats.org/" title="The official microformats wiki" class="ext">microformats</a> presentation. I expected a great deal from his presentation, maybe a little too much. It was a little too advanced for those who have never heard of microformats before and not advanced enough for the others. Maybe I shouldn't have bought that <a href="http://suffix.be/blog/microformats-book" title="My review for Allsopp's microformats book">microformats book</a> on last year's edition. ;)</p> <h3>Designing for the Coral Reef</h3> <p>Next up: <span class="vcard"><a class="url fn ext" href="http://www.blackbeltjones.com/">Matt Jones</a></span> and <span class="vcard"><a class="url fn ext" href="http://www.hackdiary.com/">Matt Biddulph</a></span>. My opinion? Splendid! Those two <a href="http://www.dopplr.com/" title="Dopplr, an online tool for frequent business travellers" class="ext">Dopplr</a> guys gave the most hectic presentation of the day and I loved it. They talked about how Dopplr could be as little intrusive as possible, a connector between different social networks and passing on the data to the next (web)app. They explained how they preferred to grow slowly, trying to build up trust first as they seem to understand where you are at a given point is sensitive data for most people. My Dopplr ‘friends’ (a word they specifically refuse to use) tripled in a single day which shows how everyone gave Dopplr a second look after their presentation, nicely done Matt & Matt.</p> <h3>The System of the World</h3> <p><span class="vcard"><a class="url fn ext" href="http://www.adactio.com/">Jeremy Keith</a></span> closed with a science fiction story which I didn't really understand in the beginning. He tried to prove that the success of social webapps are unpredictable, even though we are likely to think we can. It was an unusual presentation that felt confusing at the start but became better and better towards the end. His point on the strength of weak ties was something completely new to me. Another <a href="http://www.si.umich.edu/~rfrost/courses/SI110/readings/In_Out_and_Beyond/Granovetter.pdf" title="The strength of weak ties: a network theory revisited by Mark Granovetter (PDF)" class="ext">book</a> to read.</p> <h3>More resources</h3> <ul> <li>My dConstruct <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/schoeters/sets/72157607274925615/" title="dConstruct photo set on Flickr" class="ext">Flickr</a> photos.</li> <li>Burka's presentation “<a href="http://www.slideshare.net/dburka/designing-for-interaction-presentation/" title="Designing for Interaction on slideshare" class="ext">Designing for Interaction</a>” on slideshare.</li> <li>Çelik's presentation “<a href="http://tantek.com/presentations/2008/09/social-network-portability/" title="Social Network Portability" class="ext">Social Network Portability</a>”.</li> <li>Keith's presentation “<a href="http://www.slideshare.net/adactio/the-system-of-the-world-presentation/" title="The System of the World on slideshare" class="ext">The System of the World</a>” on slideshare.</li> </ul>

2008-09-12T18:37:57+02:00

dconstruct2008 dConstruct 2008 roundup

2008-09-19T11:51:39+02:00

Simon Schoeters <p>A few days ago we played with the <a href="http://doyoupoken.com/" title="Poken's website" class="ext">Poken</a> I got from <span class="vcard"><a class="url fn n ext" href="http://www.fousa.be" title="Fousa's blog"><span class="given-name">Jelle</span></a></span>. It's still in beta so I thought it would be good to write a short review as feedback. Please note: they are still improving the website so my review today may be old news tomorrow.</p> <h3>The hardware</h3> <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/schoeters/3211066910/" title="Larger version available on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3506/3211066910_b49b68073d_m.jpg" alt="Two Pokens" style="float: left; border: 1px solid #dfdfdf; padding: 5px; margin-right: .5em" /></a> <p>A token is a small <abbr title="Radio-frequency identification">RFID</abbr> tag and reader with an <abbr title="Universal Serial Bus">USB</abbr> plug designed as small creatures with a big hand (see photo). All the electronic stuff is in the big white hand. The creature itself is just some decoration that protects the plug.</p> <p>The Pokens are small and look silly, which is perfect for their target audience in my opinion. The playful character of the Pokens may make it more appealing for girls as well which may be a good idea for something geeky as an ‘RFID tag’.</p> <p>The <abbr title="Light-emitting diode">LED</abbr> in the hand turns green when the Pokens exchange information. If you press the button in the hand twice a small red LED will blink showing that ‘ghost’ mode is enabled. This means the Poken will act like normally but it will not share your details (but you will get theirs).</p> <p>When you connect the Poken to your computer you still need to open it and click the website link to upload the data (on a Mac that is). There is an autorun.inf file on the drive so I suppose it does this automatically on Windows, why not on Mac?</p> <p><strong>Update:</strong> we created <a href="http://www.milkcarton.be/apps/lazypoken" title="LazyPoken autostarts your Poken" class="ext">LazyPoken</a>, a small application for Mac OS X that does exactly that. It starts your Poken when you connect it with you Mac.</p> <h3>The software</h3> <p>The hardware is probably the most visible part but there seems to be more work on the software part. The Poken system is a social community site: you add ‘friends’ and share profiles. Poken tries to be that little extra by adding your friends to other services as well (Twitter and Facebook to name two). They seem to add new services quickly when their Pokens get some buzz in a certain region.</p> <p>Each Poken has a unique number. When you hold your Poken to another one the numbers are exchanged. Once home you connect your Poken to your computer and accept or deny the collected profiles. From that point on it's nothing more than a social network site. You'll see the new information when someone updates his information without having to poke him again (pun intended).</p> <p>On the website you can add a bunch of services. Poken needs to know your accounts on these services to be able to add your Poken friends to these networks. It asks your account and password information for each of these services which feels <a href="http://adactio.com/journal/1357/" title="The password anti-pattern" class="ext">very, very wrong</a>. Dear Poken, there are other ways of doing this (have a look at <a href="http://oauth.net/" title="An open protocol to allow secure API authorization" class="ext">OAuth</a>)! <strong>I do not trust you with all my passwords.</strong> I don't mind how secure your servers may be, it's just wrong. This alone makes Poken a no go for me.</p> <p>I binded my Twitter account to my Poken profile (yes, I gave you my password, shiver) and tried to add a friend. This friend was not added to my Twitter followers list. Does this run in the background and was I too fast or are there still some implementation problems?</p> <p>Then there are some minor annoyances I expect will be solved when they get out of beta:<p> <ul> <li>The website design needs some work: it's not easy to navigate.</li> <li>The difference between the big and small cards is not clear. Is the big one your complete profile and the other the discreet one?</li> <li>I couldn't find the difference between the ‘discreet’ and ‘ghost’ modes.</li> <li>Even though my friend filled in his website URL in his profile it does not show up in my list.</li> <li>The Flickr logo is missing from the profile cards.</li> <li>Apparently the battery only lasts 6 months, come on, really? Why not charge it via USB?</li> </ul> <p>Can I add a feature request as well? As Chantal already proposed on your <a href="http://getsatisfaction.com/poken/topics/export_friends_to_vcard" title="Export friends to vCard @ Get Statisfaction" class="ext">support channel</a> it would be nice to have an ‘export to vCard’ function. This would make it easy to import my friends in Address Book, which is where I want my contacts in the end.</p>

2009-01-23T00:00:56+01:00

do-you-poken Do you Poken?

2009-02-02T15:13:58+01:00