Look, I know it’s been a while since we chatted about microformats, but they’re still cool. Here: some random microformathingies I’ve been thinking and loving since our tryst last November.

First: Operator

The new(est) Operator is really rad. It’s taken Tails’ place as the de facto Firefox uformat extension, for good reason.

Just take a look at this upcoming event:

Imagine. Cool.

Second: Working With hCards

Install that extension then browse over to my (or your) Working With Rails profile. See it? Yes! The Working with Rails fellas recently added hCards to all profiles. You can now toy with Railers from the comfort of irb.

$ irb -rubygems
>> require 'mofo'
=> true
>> robby = HCard.find('http://workingwithrails.com/person/5410-rob-sanheim')
=> #<HCard:0x208189c ...>
>> robby.url.last
=> "http://www.robsanheim.com"
>> robby.fn
=> "Rob Sanheim"

Wicked. And so easy, as Martin Sadler says: “I had a quick look and suffice to say it took me about 5 mins to implement. I tested using the Firefox tails plugin and all seems in order.” C’mon, add some uformats to your site. Maybe this hCalendar tutorial will help?

Third: Making and Breaking Stuff

Last weekend I was lucky enough to talk about Web Services (and Ruby) at the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference. Some real smart people gave presentations and I pretended to be one of them. Anyway, I posted my incomprehensible slides over at SlideShare. There is some fun code sprinkled throughout, as well as some Hpricot goodness, so have at.

Fourth: mofo two point oh

Okay, it’s really just 0.2.3, but Steve Ivy, Olle Jonsson, Christian Carter, Andrew Turner, Grant Rodgers, and Denis Defreyne have fixed so many bugs and added so many new features that it might as well be Enterprise Ready™.

The newly supported formats include XFN, Geo, Adr, and hResume.

Try it out:

>> olle3 = HResume.find('http://www.linkedin.com/in/olleolleolle')
=> #<HResume:0x20ae428 ...>
>> olle3.skills
=> "Ruby on Rails passion. PHP/MySQL veteran..."
>> olle3.contact.fn
=> "Olle Jonsson"

We’ve also fixed autoloading, added support for the include pattern, added proper ISO8601 date handling, created an after_find callback (example here), made base url figurin’ actually figure, and moved to Echoe. If I missed something it’s just because I’m so excited.

Oh yeah, mofo finally has its own webpage. About damn time.

Anyway, grab it: $ sudo gem install mofo

Fifth: Javascripting

While using Ruby to parse microformats is fun and educational, Javascript is the real win.

Brian Donovan has some hcard.js wizardry while Dan Webb released the gloriously named sumo. The guy who wrote Operator, Mike Kaply, also has a bunch of Firefox and Javascript specific info over at his blog.

Sixth: Around the Web

Dr Nic’s MyConfPlan will soon let you add conferences simply by providing the url of an hCalendar-ready webpage, using mofo. Be on the lookout.

The big hAccessibility debate is really shaking things up, which is sometimes exciting and sometimes crazy.

While it’s got a lot of noise, you can kinda follow the microformat world over at the planet. Therein you may stumble upon blog posts about intercepting microformats in Rails input or versatile RESTful APIs beyond XML.

Finally, the Code in Motion guys wrote about their experience adding microformats to their stolen bike list. Good write-up and great cause.

If you’ve recently added microformats to a Railsy site, let us know in the comments. It’s cool to see them getting more and more adoption and, more importantly, more and more practical.