I've modified the Mac only bluetooth user script for operator to work on windows. It's based on this script, and originally inspired by Johns hack of Tails.

It requires the Widcomm bluetooth drivers (they're the most common, if you have c:\Program Files\WIDCOMM then you should be good to go).

Download it

I've tested it successfully on my Win XP machine to a Nokia 6230 and a Qtek S200 Win Mobile phone (aka SPV M600). It sends contacts and events, though events didn't work on my Nokia.

I don't have much available for testing it so I'm relying on some detailed feedback. I may not be able to fix it for you though!

A friend tested it on a newer Nokia, it received the file but failed to recognise it as a vcard to import. I've yet to find a way to use the bluetooth business card service, so I'm sending it just as a file transfer and relying on the device importing it. It'll probably require an XPCOM to use the Widcomm API, but this script should work as well as it's Mac counterpart.

Labels: bluetooth, microformats

I gave this talk a couple of weeks ago at GeekUp Liverpool. The aim was to illustrate how simple microformats are to implement and to convince people it's worth while by showing the tools and services that are on the horizon.



Again the slides are pretty slim on content since it was all in the talk, just let me know if you want me to elaborate on anything. I also gave a demo of the operator extension as part of the talk.

Labels: geekup, microformats, presentation

GeekUp Liverpool is tonight, 6pm at The Pilgrim. I'm going to be giving a short talk about microformats, not planning on going hugely into depth, more of an overview of the why and how.

Labels: geekup, microformats

None of us techie types like wysiwyg editors, we all know they generate awful HTML, some of them even use FONT tags still! The problem is clients need to add text to their sites, they need to format it, and they really don't want to learn HTML.

Most modern content management systems, including our own, rely on the browsers built in wysiwyg editor. These are some of the worst offenders for bad HTML, the problem is helped slightly by JavaScript components like FCKEditor that try to clear it up.

The problems really start when you try to ensure a good seperation of content and design, using carefully constructed CSS rules around semantic HTML and a rigid CSS class vocabulary. For example on our site, surrounding content with a div and blockquote results in the text being padded and surrounded with pretty quote graphics. This is great when the content author knows this, dips into HTML mode in the editor and enters the couple of tags needed.

Of course, you can't expect your clients to do that. What is really needed is an editor tightly integrated into the sites stylesheet, that helps the user markup their content in the right way without even knowing it. It needs to be easily configured by the web designer who defines the markup structures, and it needs to be context sensitive to different areas of a site.

I've tried to do this in the past, we had something similar where I used to work. What I'm imagining is a little more complicated, so it can be used to generate complex sets of data. Definition lists, site specific structures, hCard and hCal microformats. I think FCKEditor is probably a good platform to build this off but I need to have a look around first, check it doesn't already exist!

Labels: html, microformats, posh, wysiwyg

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