Tag: microformats

Please Make Holes in My Buckets! [en]

[fr] Tour d'horizon de mes différents "profils" à droite et a gauche dans le paysage des outils sociaux (social tools). Il manque de la communication entre ces différents services, et mon identité en ligne s'en trouve fragmentée et lourde à gérer. Ajouter des contacts en se basant sur mon carnet d'adresses Gmail est un bon début, mais on peut aller plus loin. Importer ses livres préférés ou des éléments de CV d'un profil à l'autre, par exemple.

[Facebook](http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=503315010) is [Stowe](http://stoweboyd.com/message)’s fault. [Twitter](http://twitter.com/stephtara) was because of [Euan](http://theobvious.typepad.com/). [Anne Dominique](http://annedominique.wordpress.com/) is guilty of getting me on [Xing/OpenBC](https://www.xing.com/profile/Stephanie_Booth). I can’t remember precisely for [Flickr](http://flickr.com/photos/bunny) or [LinkedIn](http://www.linkedin.com/in/sbooth) or — OMG! — [orkut](http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=7955153206158244373), but it was certainly somebody from [#joiito](http://joiwiki.ito.com/joiwiki/index.cgi?IrcChannel). The culprits for [Last.fm](http://www.last.fm/user/steph-tara), [DailyMotion](http://dailymotion.com/Steph) and [YouTube](http://youtube.com/profile?user=Steph “Even got there early enough to grab ‘steph’ — now I get password reminders almost everyday, great…”) have disappeared into the limbo of lost memories. [Kevin](http://epeus.blogspot.com) encouraged me to [sign up for a good dozen of blogging platforms](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2004/12/11/hosted-blog-platform-test-write-up/), open a [MySpace account](http://myspace.com/stephtara), and he’s probably to blame for me being on [Upcoming](http://upcoming.org/user/94465/). As for [wordpress.com](http://steph.wordpress.com), I’ll blame [Matt](http://photomatt.net) because he’s behind all that.

Granted, I’m probably the only one responsible for having [gotten into blogging](http://climbtothestars.org/about/ “Story here, abbreviated version.”) in the first place.

Let’s get back on track. My aim here is not primarily to point an accusing finger to all my devious friends who introduced me to these fun, [addictive](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/02/12/addicted-to-technology/), time-consuming tools (though it’s interesting to note how one forgets those things, in passing). It’s more a sort of round-up of a bunch of my “online selves”. I feel a little scattered, my friends. Here are all these buckets in which I place stuff, but there aren’t enough holes in them.

Feeds are good. Feeds allow me to have Twitter, [del.icio.us](http://del.icio.us/steph), Flickr, and even Last.fm stuff in my blog sidebar. It also allows me to connect my blogs to one another, and into Facebook. Here, though, we’re talking “content” much more than “self”.

One example I’ve already certainly talked about (but no courage to dig it out, my blog is starting to be a huge thing in which I can’t find stuff I know it contains) is contacts or buddies — the “Mine” in [Stowe’s analysis of social applications](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/02/07/stowe-boyd-building-social-applications/). I have buddy lists on IM and Skype, contacts on Flickr and just about every service I mentioned in this post. Of *course*, I don’t want to necessarily have the same contacts everywhere. I might love your photos on Flickr and add you as a contact, but not see any interest in adding you to my business network on LinkedIn. Some people, though — my **friends** — I’ll want to have more or less everywhere.

So, here’s a hole in the buckets that I really like: I’ve seen this in many services, but the first time I saw it was on Myspace. “Let us peek in your GMail contacts, and we’ll tell you who already has an account — and let you invite the others.” When I saw that, it scared me (“OMG! Myspace sticking its nose in my e-mail!”) but I also found it really exciting. Now, it would be even better if I could say “import friends and family from Flickr” or “let me choose amongst my IM buddies”, but it’s a good start. Yes, there’s a danger: no, I don’t want to spam invitations to your service to the 450 unknown adresses you found in my contacts, thankyouverymuch. [Plaxo](http://www.plaxo.com/) is a way to do this (I’ve seen it criticised but I can’t precisely remember why). Facebook does it, which means that within 2 minutes you can already have friends in the network. Twitter doesn’t, which means you have to painstakingly go through your friends of friends lists to get started. I think [coComment](http://cocomment.com) and any “friend-powered” service should allow us to import contacts like that by now. And yes, sure, privacy issues.

But what about all my **profile information**? I don’t want to have to dig out my favourite movies each time I sign up to a new service. Or my favourite books. Or the schools I went to. I mean, some things are reasonably stable. Why couldn’t I have all that in a central repository, once and for all, and just have all these neat social tools import the information from there? Earlier today, [David](http://galipeau.blogspot.com/) was telling me over IM that he’d like to have a central service to bring all our Facebook, LinkedIn, OpenBC/Xing, and MySpace stuff together. Or a way to publish his CV/résumé online and allow Facebook to access it to grab data from it. Good ideas, in my opinion.

I’ll mention [OpenID](http://openid.net/) here, but just in passing, because although in my dreams in used to hold the promise of this centralised repository of “all things me”, I don’t think that it’s what it has been designed for (if I get it correctly, it is identity **verification** and doesn’t have much to do with the **contents** of this identity). [Microformats](http://microformats.org) could on the other hand certainly come in handy here.

So, please, make more holes in my buckets. Importing Gmail contacts in sticking feeds here and there is nice, but not sufficient. For the moment, Facebook seems promising. But let me use Twitter for my statuses, for example, or at least include the feed somewhere (I can only include one feed, so I’ve included my [suprglu one](http://steph.suprglu.com/), but it has a huge lag and is not very satisfying). Let me put photographs in my albums directly from Flickr. Talk with the profiles I made with other similar services. Grab my school and work info from LinkedIn and OpenBC. Then make all this information you have about me available to republish how I want it (feeds, feeds, feeds! widgets! buttons! badges!) where I want it.

Also, [more granularity](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2006/12/12/you-should-twitter/). Facebook has a good helping of it: I can choose which type of information I want to see from my contacts. I can restrict certain contacts from seeing certain parts of my profile. I’d like fine control on who can see what, also by sorting my people into “buddy groups”. “Friends” and “Family” as on Flickr is just not enough. And maybe Facebook could come and present me with [Stowe-groupings](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/02/07/stowe-boyd-building-social-applications/) of my contacts, based on the interactions I have with them.

Share your wild ideas here if you have any.

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Microformats et Bloggy Friday d'octobre [fr]

[en] Announcement for the next Bloggy Friday formatted with hCalendar microformat, and my hCard. Can you do anything interesting with them?

Octobre approche! Allez, j’annonce déjà notre prochaine rencontre:


Bloggy Friday d’octobre au Café de l’Evêché, Lausanne
6 octobre 20h00 jusqu’à tard

Rencontre mensuelle, le premier vendredi de chaque mois, des blogueurs romands ou d’ailleurs (on n’est pas sectaires!)

Inscriptions par commentaire sur le blog de Stephanie Booth (merci d’utiliser le billet annonçant l’événement, publié en général une semaine avant la rencontre).

En venant au Bloggy Friday, vous avez l’occasion de rencontrer d’autres blogueurs du coin fort sympathiques. Les nouvelles têtes sont toujours bienvenues.

Si vous êtes timides, soyez tout de même prévenus que vous courez le risque d’être photographié, blogué, — si vous ne voulez pas, il sera donc important de le faire savoir aux paparazzi présents!

This
hCalendar event brought to you by the
hCalendar Creator and modified slightly by CTTS.

Pas mal, hein? Mais ce que vous ne voyez pas au premier coup d’oeil, c’est que j’ai utilisé [le microformat hCalendar](http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar-fr) pour baliser le texte ci-dessus. Jetez un coup d’oeil à la source de cette page, vous y verrez des choses…

Microformats?! késako? Allez, [une petite explication de vive voix](http://climbtothestars.org/files/2006-09-14-stephanie-booth-ctts.mp3) [1.7Mb, 3min38] dans mon podcast du jour. 17.09 12h30: Je viens de corriger le lien vers le podcast, merci à [Anne Dominique](http://annedominique.wordpress.com) et bouuh à tous ceux qui ne m’ont rien dit…

Et comme promis dans le podcast, my carte de visite en format hCard (attention les vélos):

Photo of Stephanie Booth.
Stephanie
Jane
Booth

Climb to the Stars
Guiguer-de-Prangins 11

Lausanne
,
VD
,
1004

Suisse

+41786254474

This hCard created with the hCard creator and modified slightly by CTTS.

Balèze, non? Ah oui, [il vous faut encore essayer Tails](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2006/09/09/try-tails/). [Tails](http://blog.codeeg.com/tails-firefox-extension-03/) est une extension Firefox qui permet de voir quels informations microformattées sont contenues dans une page. Si vous voulez ensuite faire quelque chose avec ces informations, n’oubliez pas d’installer les scripts Tails qui se trouve en bas de la page.

Qui arrive à importer la carte de visite hCard et l’événement hCalendar contenus dans ce billet dans son calendrier ou son carnet d’adresse? (Allez, tuyau, Technorati — entre autres — a un parseur pour [hCalendar](http://feeds.technorati.com/event/) et [hCard](http://feeds.technorati.com/contacts/) si vous ne vous en sortez pas avec Tails. Oops. En panne. OK, pas en panne, mauvaise adresse (corrigée). Mais ça semble quand même pas marcher pour moi.)

Côté podcast, mis à part les ratures habituelles, j’ai cette-fois-ci parsemé le fichier audio de liens en rapport avec ce dont je parle. Vous pouvez les voir dans iTunes (j’ai testé). Ça me rendrait service que vous me disiez ce que votre lecteur de podcasts préféré fait avec ces liens, et si ça vous est utile (ou bien est-ce que je les mets aussi dans le billet? existe-t-il un extracteur de liens de podcasts?).

Bon, allez, assez parlé. J’ai des tas de trucs à faire 🙂

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Try Tails! [en]

[fr] Une extension Flock/Firefox qui permet de visualiser les informations présentes dans une page sous forme de microformats.

The [Firefox extension Tails](http://blog.codeeg.com/tails-firefox-extension-03/) shows you what microformats are embedded in the page you’re viewing. Try it out here while K2 is still on! Thanks to [Yoan](http://yoan.dosimple.ch/blog/) for pointing it out to me.

Tail on CTTS

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K2 [en]

[fr] Essai d'habillage. K2 semble aussi être un bon point de départ, peut-être nécessitant moins de travail que Sandbox.

[Chris](http://factoryjoe.com/blog/) suggested that [I check out K2](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2006/09/09/using-hatom/#comment-125799), which has been [hAtomised](http://getk2.com/2006/08/k2-plays-in-sandbox/). I have to say I like it! There might be less work starting from K2 than [from Sandbox](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2006/09/09/the-hatomisation-of-ctts/). The only grudge I might have against K2 for the moment is that [they prefer UTW](http://getk2.com/about/) to my [Bunny Tags](http://dev.wp-plugins.org/wiki/BunnysTechnoratiTags). (Means I don’t have a lot else to complain about.)

Modifying the template for Bunny Tags and Basic Bilingual was quickly done. I quite like this Star Wars design, even though it’s not pink! Here’s a screenshot, because I guess it won’t last long…

CTTS Trying Out K2 Vader Clothing

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The hAtomisation of CTTS [en]

[fr] Un pas vers l'implémentation du microformat hAtom sur Climb to the Stars. J'ai commencé à adapter le thème WordPress Sandbox, qui est déjà tout plein de hAtom, pour que le résultat ressemble à ce que vous avez l'habitude de voir ici.

Par la même occasion, j'ai commencé à transformer ma sidebar en widgets -- c'est comme des petits blocs de construction qu'on peut ensuite assembler à sa guise, sans mettre les doigts dans le code.

Well, I’ve made good progress. Starting with the [Sandbox theme](http://www.plaintxt.org/themes/sandbox/), I imported and converted most of the CSS from my pink theme into a Sandbox skin. It’s not quite there yet.

I edited the function (provided with the theme) which generates navigation links so that it would show the few links I wanted instead of my huge list of pages. Then, there are a few things which are not in the right order in the Sandbox template for me to make them appear where I want. For example, I had to swap entry-title and entry-date so that the date of the post would float at the top right as it does here. Then, I had to add my own personal stuff: the lang attribute on the hentry div. The “other-excerpt” block, the technorati cosmos link, the tags, the trackback url at the bottom of the post. Phew.

I also installed the [widgets plugin](http://automattic.com/code/widgets/) and started converting my sidebar to [widgets](http://widgets.wordpress.com/). Great fun! But still not quite there yet either. The first difficulty was understanding that widgets are plugins and need to be activated before they appear in the widgets pool.

If you embark on a similar adventure, get the [Exec PHP widget](http://ottodestruct.com/blog/2006/04/09/fun-with-widgets/) first. You can literally paste your current sidebar into it. You’re allowed nine instances of it, once you find that you can select that number lower down on the widgets page. [Drop-down archive widget](http://tech.windsofstorm.net/wordpress/drop-archive-widget/) is nice. Sadly, [Show coComments](http://irgeek.net/projects/show-cocomments/) doesn’t seem to like apostrophes as a title, and there’s obviously something else wrong too — it worked briefly for me, but then stopped working. Didn’t manage to figure out why despite over half an hour of troubleshooting. Oh, and while I was at it, I uncovered a [small glitch in the coComment Enhancer plugin](http://www.andare.ch/blog/2006/05/cocomment-enhancer-wordpress-plugin-v12b/#comment-5817) — if your blog URL and wordpress install URLs are different, you might want to patch up your version (it’s really easy).

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ETech: I'm at Microformats BOF! [en]

[fr] Petite démonstration avec apparition vidéo de bibi à  ETech, dans un peu moins de deux heures. Didier Barbas a bossé dur sur le projet!

Well, almost. There should be a minute or so of video footage of me in [Kevin](http://epeus.blogspot.com)’s lightening demo on tags during the [Microformats Panel](http://microformats.org/wiki/events/2006-03-07-etech-microformats) tonight.

Check it out! It has to do with [this little project](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2006/03/05/project-with-technorati-api/). [Didier Barbas](http://sungnyemun.org/wordpress/) wrote the code, graduating from coding slave to coding hero in the process. If you need an Iron Coder, hire him! (He tells me he loves it…)

So, head off to Microformats BOF.

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