Christian Heilmann

Posts Tagged ‘microformats’

GeoMaker update – new features and source available on GitHub

Monday, July 20th, 2009

Over the course of the weekend I finished polishing GeoMaker and uploaded the source to GitHub. So now you can use GeoMaker or its API and also host them on your own server.

The new features include:

  • Embedding of Geo microformats into a text when originally you wanted to analyse a text and intermediate text display.
  • Turning RSS feeds into maps (much like RSS2Map) with an intermediate filtering step
  • Total re-code (includes instead of one massive chunk, configuration and labels file)
  • Help and About and Developer docs

See the changes in action in the following screencast (the design of the RSS preview has changed since – more obvious now):

The next steps will be to allow for multiple map providers. Got any other ideas?

Geo this! Geolocate WordPress posts with Greasemonkey and Yahoo Placemaker

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

Geolocating content on the web is a great idea. By embedding latitude and longitude and real place names in your document you allow data mining for location or easy display on a map.

The problem up to now was that it is quite a job to find out the correct geo information from a text or a document and it is quite a pain to enter the information by hand.

Yahoo Placemaker is a web service that helps you with that – you give it some text or a document URL and it returns you all the things it found in there that resemble a geographical location back. The issue with doing that on a live site is that you slow down your site immensely as you need to look up every time.

The more logical place to do the lookup with Placemaker is when you edit your document. I thought this would be cool to have for this WordPress install here and wrote a small GreaseMonkey script that injects a new “Geo this!” button in the main WP form:

Geo this - button by  you.

When I hit the button the script does an Ajax request using the Placemaker open YQL table to get the information for the currently edited text.

Once it found the information it adds it at the end of the document as a GEO microformat. Each found entry starts with a comment that tells you what Placemaker matched and considered a geographical location. As it is not infallible this makes it easy for you to delete wrong entries.

Geo this - added microformats by  you.

Try it out yourself:

This is pretty much rough and ready and I’d be happy for feedback how to improve it.

TTMMHTM – Rocket Packs, Chiptunes in Ruby, Times People API and Museums and form filling Microformats in YQL

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

Things that made me happy this morning

TTMMHTM: YUI Git hosting, ARIA Video, Accessible Design Interview and YUI Docs builder

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

To bring some positive effects into this world, here are a few things that made me happy this morning (TTMMHTM):

Is this sharing of happiness useful?

Show off your hidden data with SearchMonkey – new article on Digital-Web

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

Digital Web just released my new article about showing the world your page-embedded data with Searchmonkey. SearchMonkey is a new Yahoo product that allows you to enhance search results with information that is in your document but wasn’t indexed by Yahoo. You can either retrieve this information with an XSLT and transforming the document or by picking from RDF and microformatic data in the document.

The article is a step-by-step tutorial how to turn the search results of Facebook apps into a richer experience by showing a thumbnail preview and a description without having to click through to facebook:

Facebook Applications search results with and without Searchmonkey