Besides consuming Microformats - it’s useful to know how to produce them. Assaf Arkin has extracted a Microformat Helper from his scrAPI plugin. It supports hAtom, basic hCard, and the datetime design pattern currently - and should be easy to add some more microformats. Check out his Microformat Helper Cheatsheet if you’re addicted to that sort of thing.

Out of the Ruby realm, BlogHelper has a good set of tools and howtos for Using Microformats in WordPress.

RSS-Extensions Wiki is like Microformats documentation for RSS. It is a central point for looking up the various encodings, formats, uses, and resources for extensions like creativeCommons, Yahoo Wather, or Apple iTunes RSS.

There is a link to some good articles on how to extend RSS by adding your own namespaces. A discussion like this is currently ongoing in GeoRSS on how best to add named locations, addresses, non-Political features (oceans for example), and general areas (like USGS regions). It’s a mixture of what is understandable by the user (web devs & programmers who will actually use these extensions), covers most use cases (so users are happy and use the extension and don’t go and try to make their own), and hopefully builds or uses existing formats.

Pat Cappelaere, who developed the very cool GeoBliki, proposed the following extension:

    
      BR
      Brazil
      
      

      729
      Antarctica
      50
      Antarctica

      Sítio do Mato
      Estreito
    

which does a good job of providing a fairly simple format for users to produce and parse when developing tools. This is important because while people aren’t really meant to read RSS, they’re still developing the tools to handle the RSS, and therefore need to understand it.

RSS-Extensions Wiki also a great list of RSS Syndication Hacks, which is full of ideas for projects, or integration into your existing projects, like programming/code todo’s (@todo in source or repository commits), or finding media to add to your iTunes.

As most people who read this blog are probably aware, Flickr added mapping directly. What they didn’t advertise or get talked about is the formatting they’re supporting.

Hidden underneath the “taken…” line is a bit of Microformat geo:

<span class=”geo” style=”display:none”>
  <span class=”latitude”>38.017804</span>,
  <span class=”longitude”>-78.475342</span>
</span>

Additionally, in the RSS output, you can get GeoRSS tags. You need to add the following to your URL: &georss=1.

It’s a great example, and source, of how easy it is to add some simple markup to your HTML and RSS to add geographic annotation.

In my last post I referred to an article that compares various online mapping servers.

Now you can see the effect for your self. ocarto allows you to overlay 7 layers of maps from Google, Yahoo, MS Virtual Earth, and Terraserver.

Search for: 44.300572,-78.339096 in ocarto, and zoom in all the way. It’s the town of Peterborough, Ontario, Canada.

You can search for the nearby town of Royal Oak, MI to see a lot of new development, roads that don’t exist on many maps, existing on Google. (I’ll send them a cookie)

By popular demand (ok, one request), I am putting up instructions on how to have your del.icio.us links posted daily to your blog.

I like this, as feed readers then have a succinct list of interesting sites to show (rather than a sidebar, who goes to a blog anymore?). A list of links is often more interesting than some half-written paragraph of diatribe just to get to the point. (case in point).

How to setup del.icio.us to post daily links

1. Log into del.icio.us
2. On the right-side, under “experimental”, choose “daily blog posting”
3. Click “add new thingy” (yes, it really says “thingy”, those crazy del.icio.users
4. Fill in the form as appropriate, here is an example:
   • job_name: DailyLinks
   • out_name: (blog user - e.g. delicious)
   • out_pass: (blog password for that user)
   • out_url: http://highearthorbit.com/xmlrpc.php
   • out_time: 3 (approx time to post, in GMT)
   • out_blog_id: (leave this blank)
   • out_cat_id: (category id, look at the id in your blogging software)
5. Click “Submit Query”

Sometime within the appointed hour (they’re spaced out so neither del.icio.us’s servers, or ping services, are flooded ‘on the hour’) your new links will be posted.

For this blog, I created a new user, gave that user Author privileges, and created a specific category, bookmarks