I've just marked up my little bio on the right hand side there with some subtle microformats. You may notice the vCard link which uses technorati to parse the HTML and returns a vCard, you can also use browser plugins to like Tails to extract the data and do what you want with it (bluetooth it to a phone, like Jeremy demoed at BarCamp).

Next I wanted to markup the names and urls of commenters on my blog, (no real reason). But I quickly hit a wall, blogger templates! I don't know why I'm still using this system, I keep promising myself I'll migrate to something better. Anyway I decided to spend a few minutes seeing if I could hack it to do what I want. The problem is that the blogger template has a single tag that is replaced with the link, <$BlogCommentAuthor$> turns into something like <a href="http://example.com" rel="nofollow">Joe Bloggs</a>

My awful awful hack goes something like this, <a class="fn url" junk=<a href="http://example.com" rel="nofollow">Joe Bloggs</a> . Now this is of course totally invalid XHTML, there are no quotes around an attribute and the chevron isn't encoded. But it works! Except when I try to use technorati to parse a vCard, but Tails works fine, if I'm lucky it might be something other than the hack causing it.

I've noticed a problem though, I allow anonymous posts, which appear as spans instead of links, so you get something like <a class="fn url" junk=<span class="anon">Anonymous</span> so then I have to add a closing anchor after, and we end up with an anchor with no href. Maybe I should just ban anonymous postings!

Labels: blogger, hack, microformats

It's been bothering me that you can't make use of the cool new templates stuff in blogger 2 when you're hosting your own blog. One thing I found really annoying was that there's no clear way to have a tag cloud of your tagged posts. So I just threw together this little bit of code that generates a tag cloud based on file sizes in your labels folder, it was quicker and easier than counting occurence of a string in each file and I thinks it's good how it's representitive of how much I've written rather than how many posts. It makes plain old HTML and sticks it in an app variable, i recommend running it on app start and maybe on another url to run when you need. (Yes I know it's classic ASP, just don't ask!) '############## OPTIONS scaleSize = 0.9 baseSize = 0.6 labelsPath = "/labels/" '###################### strCloud="" set fs = createobject("Scripting.filesystemobject") set folder = fs.getFolder(server.MapPath(labelsPath)) iHighest = 0 iLowest = 10000 iCount = 0 for each file in folder.files if file.size > iHighest then iHighest = file.size end if if file.size < iLowest then iLowest = file.size end if iCount=iCount+1 next for each file in folder.files strCloud=strCloud&"<a href="""&labelsPath&file.name&""" style=""font-size:"&((file.size-iLowest)/(iHighest-iLowest)*scaleSize)+baseSize&"em;"">"&left(file.name,instrrev(file.name,".")-1)&"</a> " next application("tagcloud") = strCloud

Labels: blogger, tagcloud, tagging

I noticed yesterday that the guys over at blogger had decided my blog was worthy of note, so for the last 24 hours I've been on the blogger homepage as Tuesdays blog of note. For all you hundreds of people following that link, let me introduce myself, my name is Thom, I am a web developer working in Liverpool (UK). I recently started up my own company with someone else, we'll be doing all sorts of bespoke web applications and helping people with internet marketing. I've been in this business for about 8 years now. A couple of people have asked me to link to them because they're desperate for all the traffic they can get. So in the spirt of spreading the hyperlink love, here's a little shout out:

• The Bug-eyed Chronicles My brothers blog
• MJJames ex-colleague, really likes star trek
• Reflective Perspective another ex-colleague, very much a programmers blog
• Derek Says ex-colleague again, combination of geeking and music

Labels: blogger, me

I don't think I'm the only person who finds it difficult to remember what blog posts they've commented on and fails to check back on the conversation, many blog applications let you subscribe to a feed of the comments, but not blogger. So a little while ago I wrote a script that will screen scrape and parse up the comments page, and give you an RSS feed. It's not perfect but it's worked ok so far, I use it on my blog here to offer a comment feed on each individual post. Thats great as long as everyone starts using it and I can subscribe to all the post comments I want, but not everyone does use it. So I also wrote a greasemonkey script that gives me a subscribe button on every blogger comments page. More info here.

Labels: blogger, comment feed, greasemonkey, rss