Spent a little time perusing my blogroll and saw some cool resources that I wanted to highlight—perhaps if only for my own reference, but also for generating a little bit more awareness.

The first cool thing is this plug-in for Firefox called the Gmail manager. If you have more than one Gmail account like me, checking mail on said accounts is a bit of a hassle. Gtalk doesn’t help any because it’s account-specific. However with the Gmail manager plug-in for Firefox, you can toggle (with a right-click on the task bar) between accounts to see how many new messages you’ve got in either and a single-click sign-on. That RAWKS! It’s a must-have plug-in for Firefox.

The second cool thing that I came across today was what’s called Microformats. I know it’s probably been around for awhile, but it’s new to me. Esssentially it works like this…it’s a method of providing a dynamic feed of contacts, calendar events and reviews. I think generally Tails (these contacts and calendar feeds) are generally treated as a sort of sidebar type element or plug-in of Firefox and other more progressive bars (yes that would leave IE out of the picture).

I don’t fully understand tails, but I can see the potential…particularly with my band CRASH EFFECT. It’d be a great way to share our upcoming show information and allow people to add that information to their calendar with relative ease.

As far as the hCard goes, I don’t think that is such a great idea. With all the data mining software out there attempting to harvest more and more e-mail addresses (for spam purposes), the idea of openly sharing your contact information in a universal format spells trouble.

Anyway, here’s a brief tutorial for integrating Tails into WordPress that you might find interesting. As well as a web-based hCalendar Creator. But it looks like it wouldn’t be that difficult to create the feed manually. Below is an excerpt of what the code looks like to create an hCalendar feed:


<div class="vevent">
<a class="url" href="http://www.crasheffect.com">
<abbr class="dtstart" title="20060915T2000-0600">September 15th 8pm</abbr>,
<abbr class="dtend" title="20060916T2300-0600"> 11pm 2006</abbr> —
<span class="summary">My Event Name</span>— at
<span class="location">Saint Paul, MN</span>
</a>
<div class="description">This is my description tag here where I can fill in information about the event.</div>
</div>

It appears that the start title (20060915T2000-0600) is the following date coding convention:

YYYYMMDD T 24HOURTIME +/-GMT

So that is the 4-digit YEAR, 2-digit MONTH, 2-digit DAY, the letter T (for time), the 24-hour, four-digit format of the time (starting or ending depending upon the tag) and then followed by where you are in respect to GMT time. In our case here in Minnesota, -0600. So for today’s date and current time, it might look like this:

20060915T1000-0600
Translation: 9/15/2006 10:00 AM, -0600 GMT

Everything else in the tags seem pretty self-explanatory. If I find out more information about Microformats, I’ll be sure to post it here.

September 15, 2006, 10:01 am

Filed under: Applications, Development, Wordpress

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