We’ve taken a small leap and added several microformats to Obsidian Portal. It was just so easy, there was no reason not to. For starters, we’re going with hCard and XFN.
Right from the start, we’re going whole-hog on hCard. I made a helper function to output an hCard every time we display a user’s avatar. So, every comment, every recent update, every friend link has an hCard on it. If the microformat-aware spiders cannot figure out who is who on Obsidian Portal, then they’re brain-dead.
Secondly, we’ve added XFN rels on the friend-links in the user’s profile. I don’t know of any (non-trivial) tools that are using XFN yet, but it’s easy enough to add, so we did. We’ve got rel=me on links to user’s other websites, and even self-referential rel=me links on the profile pages. We’re basically screaming “I am me” at the spiders.
Still on the TODO list is rel-tag for the NPC character tags. We’ve got a lot of plans for tags in the future, we just need to free up some time to work.
In the future, I might look at adding hAtom for the Adventure Logs, but honestly, we’ve already got RSS feeds, and I can’t see the value-add here. Am I missing something? Let me know.
Examples
- My profile - hCard and XFN enabled
- The homepage - Notice the hCard for each recent-update user
- An Adventure Log post - Notice the hCards for the comments
Resources
- Microformats.org - The definitive source for information.
- Operator - A microformat parser plugin for Firefox. Adds a nice little toolbar that lights up when microformats are detected.
- Tails Export - Another microformat parser plugin for Firefox. Seems to handle de-duping better than Operator.
- rel-lint - A validator / checker for XFN and rel-tag
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