So I’ve been thinking about standardizing how we “syndicate” posts (or blurbs) in HTML. Currently the decisions about how to organize divs and what to call classes are fairly arbitrary. But if there was a standard and predictable way of organizing what is essentially structured data, then we’d have a much easier time building stylesheets and dealing with edge cases and contingencies.

There are two problems that this proposed microformat and its associated CSS recommendations are meant to solve. The first is preventing excessively long text (usually long hyperlinked URLs) from breaking out of the post-content container. The second is preventing floated blocks (usually images) from breaking out of the bottom of the post-content container.

As I understand it, with microformats the choice of which tags to use (h1 vs. h2 vs. div) and the hierarchical location of the tags is not nearly as important as a standard lexicon of class names. In the syndication world, the RSS’s use item to refer to a chunk of content and Atom uses entry, neither of which I like. I’ve used blurb as a class name previously, usually because I was structuring blurbs and not full content. However this format should work for both blurbs and full content items, in which case I think post is the most appropriate. But I could be persuaded otherwise. My concern is that it’s not sufficiently generic. Would it make sense to call a full text article a post?

Proposed Blog Post Microformat

<div class="post">
    <div class="post-header">
    <h1 class="post-title"></h1>
    </div>

    <div class="post-content">
        <div class="post-content-footer"></div>
    </div>
    <div class="post-footer"></div>
</div>

Some optional classes might include: post-date, post-byline

Blog Post Microformat Illustration

Recommended Minimal CSS elements

/* prevents overlong text without spaces
   from poking out the side of div.post-content */
div.post-content {
    overflow:hidden;
}

/* prevents floated blocks from poking
   out the bottom of the post-content div */
div.post-content-footer {
    clear:both;
}

Prior Art

• http://microformats.org/wiki/blog-post-formats
• http://microformats.org/wiki/blog-post-brainstorming

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.

I wonder if this is correct. I’ve always thought that links to pages within a domain really didn’t amount to much in Google, but perhaps I was wrong.

The PageRank algorithm is most famously characterized as valuing links that are highly referred to by other people. It seems that is only part of the story. The PageRank algorithm values links to yourself more. That is, a website that has many pages and is densely inter-woven with links becomes a sort of PageRank machine.

To read later: Pagerank Explained

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.

The hot topic at Webzine was videoblogging (aka vlogging), which is funny because video as a medium seems about as far from the traditional print ‘zines as one can get. Behold the synergizing power of the internets.

Thus some of the videobloggers at the conference had set up a studio in the spirit of a Real World™ confessional booth—complete with a green screen and everything. But being the shy text blogger that I am, I wasn’t going out of my way to speak in front of a camera. Except that in the middle of a panel on podcasting someone nabbed me–she was tall and blond–and I found myself trying to construct coherent sentences in front of a camera lens (about whatever I wanted) while the discussion was booming below.

Tonight I discovered the end result. I was included in a compilation of several other confessors from Webzine. Click the thumbnail below to see my 42 seconds of fame.

What I said:

My name is Justin Watt and my URL is justinsomnia.org. I’m a personal blogger. I also do web production for O’Reilly Media in Sebastopol, California. I recently moved to California from North Carolina. Blogging is a great way to keep in touch with family members and friends. I got started back in college, talking about things that I was reading online in other blogs. There are a lot of conversations you can have with people who are right in front of you. There are a lot of conversations you can have with people who are out in the world in other places, other times. Blogs are a great way to have an asynchronous conversation. That’s me.

The best part is, they replaced the green screen behind me with a screenshot of my blog! Which happens to show my liveblogging post of the Webzine conference. How meta!

Justin Hall and Annalee Newitz are the conf MC’s. I’m not usually a big fan of liveblogging, but I’m going to update this post today and tomorrow for anyone interesting in the comings and goings of Webzine 2005.

Levelling the Playing Field: Journalism Online

Agh, panels of sort of journalists talking about “new media.” Needs more controversy.

Jacob Appelbaum, Featured Speaker

Jacob Appelbaum was rousing. Slideshow at random in the background, discussion on the front channel. I first heard about Jacob on Boingboing (here and here). Dude went to Iraq after his dad died, or was killed at the hands of some heroin junkies. Very frustrated with American policy internationally and domestically, after having recently traveled to Houston Astrodome and New Orleans after Katrina.

Rich Media Tools Workshop

Josh Kinberg, the Bikes against Bush guy is here, and he’s working on a video blogging client called FireANT, which I heard about first at the BlogHer conference. There’s a demo at 3:30, but I can’t miss the sex blog session next.

JD Lasica, Darknet author, talking about Ourmedia, a new front end to the Internet Archive.

O’Reilly recently published an interview with JD that I haven’t read yet. I can’t tell if that’s because I’m becoming kind of numb to the content I produce, or if the content isn’t compelling for various reasons—because on the surface, we publish a lot of interesting stuff. And if I could identify the weak spots, maybe I could help improve our sites.

Mike Hudack of bliptv.

Dave Toole of Outhink, creating a content collaboration tool called SpinXpress. Sounds like Ian Clarke’s Freenet, sounds like Nullsoft’s WASTE.

Liveblogging is hard, mostly cause I like all my stuff to be linked up, and mostly because I didn’t get access to the wireless until 2:30.

Annalee is very concerned about everyone getting laid. At least everyone that wants to. No joke. Wear a Webzine button your sleeve if you want to hook up tonight.

18 or Over Only: A Look at the Laws, Technology, and Style of Adult Sites

A lot of FUD about anti-porn laws, and it’s not that this isn’t something we shouldn’t fight, or be concerned about, but it’s a little overbearing. I mean, Violet Blue and Tina Butcher (a suicide girl) are on the panel and they’ve barely gotten a word in edgewise. Guess I was expecting more titilation and less strum und drung.

Finally some sanity from David Steinberg: don’t panic. Fight the man, but avoid the chilling effect at the same time.

Podcasting: The Democratization of Broadcast?

RU Sirius (of Mondo 2000 fame) on a panel about podcasting. Cool.

Hacking Gadgets and Electronics

I finally got to see the Phillip Torrone show, and I admit, it was quite good. Which is strange because he works for O’Reilly as an editor and blogger for Make Magazine.

But why am I blogging anymore? I should be out in seach of life and more importantly, food.

The Art of Distribution: RSS, Tagging

Niall Kennedy of Technorati, RSS geek. Ok, basic RSS details… Nothing really new here. But I’m thinking about some site design changes I’d like to make.

Video Blogging Panel

Moderated by Schlomo Rabinowitz, whoa this guy’s name really is Schlomo? Yey, let’s watch Meet the Vloggers courtesy of Zadi Diaz (KarmaGrrrl).

Hmm, I wonder if you could mount a little Canon Digital camera to a harmonica holder for personal videoblogging? Kind of a 21st century Bob Dylan?

Bre Pretis (I make things) started We are the Media. Is FireANT or something like it going to be the new TV?

Renegade Rene (Luxomedia) working on viral video art project called The Green Thing. Emphasis on collaboration, mixing, remixing videos online.

Rocketboom mentioned, a three minute daily videoblog based in New York City.

Got to see Ryanne on a videoblogging panel at BlogHer, but because of lack of internet, didn’t blog much about it. But she mentioned freevlog that I’ve been meaning to check out.

You Are The Media: Video Blogging 101

Speak of the devil, the workshop is following along with the steps outlined at freevlog. Pretty basic, seems to rely on Quicktime Pro (on Mac or Windows) for most basic video editing functions.

Reminds me of another article I produced for O’Reilly’s Digital Media site, What Is Vlogging (and How to Get Started). I’d really like more technical detail about video/sound formats, codecs, settings, etc.

Microformats: What the Hell Are They and Why Should I Care?

Ryan King from Technorati on microformats, presentation here. This is a smart idea, got to see Tantek give a similar presentation at FOO Camp last month.

Rather than cooking up your own XML DTD/Schema, the microformats guys are advising using a combination of XHTML (which is XML afterall) and class attributes to create structured data for things like blogrolls (XFN), contact information (hCard), and calendaring (hCalendar).

One of the principles Tantek stressed (at FOO Camp) was that “invisible metadata deteriorates.” I wonder what my librarian friends would say about that? The benefit of XHTML is that browsers already exist on every platform to display whatever you markup. Using a combination of tags and CSS, create a format the benefits the user first, and the machine second.

Featured Speaker: Jonas Luster

Rant. Says a hole in a sheet of paper (that your can’t see the hole, just the matter around it and the matter behind it) is analogous with social networks. Reminds me of my dad being displeased with the name donut holes—he’d rather they be called “anti-holes.” Back to social networking, what exists is you and me interacting, the social part, or bond, is the result. And thus social networking software is bunk, in his humble opinion. Not a good sign for the O’Reilly Connection. He’s not a fan of the “long tail” concept either, because he’s a sociology phd. Perhaps I should entertain him with my Web 2.0 drinking game.

Doing Information Architecture On the Cheap

Eh. I don’t think IA is bad, per se, but that people who “practice” IA have such a hard time defining what they do or how it’s different from usability or interaction design, often gives me pause.

Someone said card sort. Take a shot. The most disappointing google search evar: “information architecture drinking game”.

And this concludes my liveblogging for the weekend. Now off to find food with Mark.

As much as web developers complain about the lack of standards support in Internet Explorer (when they’re developing on Firefox), it’s really quite another ballgame confronting the variety of syndication standards and newsreaders out there. I was recently responsible for developing and implementing a new feed generation mechanism for the O’Reilly Network family of sites (oreillynet.com, windowsdevcenter.com, macdevcenter.com, linuxdevcenter.com, onjava.com, ondotnet.com, onlamp.com, perl.com, xml.com, among others) that would bring up our standards support and allow us to include some additional content in our feeds like graphics and enclosures.

When the Atom 1.0 standard was released, I was able to have our new feeds compliant that afternoon. The problem of course is that there’s been a lag in the Atom 1.0 support in the newsreaders out there. Case in point. The other day I removed the rel="alternate" attribute from the atom:link element–I was informed it was actually optional. So I was not surprised this morning to get two bug reports from Safari RSS users that post titles were no longer linking to the actual post entry.

I put the rel="alternate" back in and Safari RSS again links to our posts. Yey. rel="alternate" is mandatory for Safari RSS. We’ve gotten reports that Akregator (a KDE newsreader) is complaining about our Atom feeds. NetNewsWire 2.0.1 which supposedly supports Atom 1.0 does not find any items in our feeds. Bloglines performs admirably, but removes whitespace around links in atom:summary elements. The good news is that if you plug our feeds into the Feed Validator, we get a thumbs up.

Hopefully these issues will be hashed out as the standard is more widely adopted. In the meantime, any of our Atom 1.0 feeds are also available in either the RSS 1.0 or the RSS 2.0 format. So if the Atom Mac DevCenter feed (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/feed/3) is not working for you, you can request the RSS 2.0 version by adding ?format=rss2 to the URL: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/feed/3?format=rss2. Cool huh?

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.