Microformarts, and the Tagzania userscript for Operator
Tagzania
standardized. There are several microformats, for personal and
businnes contact information and else. There are a couple of them
related to location: adr (addresses) and geo (geographic position at
large). Tagzania is already compatible with microformats: every
location, every item, has it's position microformatted according to
the geo standard. Learn more here, http://www.microformats.org/
Now, thanks to Tony 'Tones' Farndon, there's another way to integrate
Microformats and Tagzania. We are in debt with Tony, who just a couple
of days back announced here the Minimap Sidebar extension for Firefox.
Remember, that's at http://firefox.spatialviews.com
some screenshots here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/luistxo/715198257/
And now, after some private exchanges, Tony gives us this present, the
userscript for Operator.
The tool that Tony prepared is a userscript for another Firefox addon.
To put in plainly:
- There's one useful tool or addon for the Firefox browser called
Operator. This lets you extract information from microformats very
easily. You just surf the web, and if microformats are present, they
are made visible by Operator, and you get lots of functions to reuse
the information.
- The userscript by Tony, introduces Tagzania compatibility in the
Operator. This lets you add to Tagzania the address and geo
information that Operator finds microformatted while you surf the web.
So, the Operator is installed as a bar in your Firefox browser. In
that bar, there are several icons representing different microformats,
and if information is detected, numbers appear in the bar, with
displayable options. For contact data, you can use the pulldown menu
to store or import those contacts to a variery of tools, for instance.
Now, if we add the Tagzania userscript to Operator, the address and
geo icons of the bar, when active, show Tagzania options in the
pulldown menus. Look at this screenshot:
http://www.tagzania.com/doc/about/tools/microformats/operator-adr-usa.jpg
Three addresses have been detected by Operator (as well as 3 hCard
contact information sets and 6 calendar entries or events). The
pulldown menu of the adr icon shows the options available for each of
the addresses: there are several options there, two from Tagzania, you
can see places that are near that place, or post that location to
Tagzania.
This other example below shows a variery of microformatted data
detected by Operator, and one geo set, with latitude and longitude
info, that you can reuse in Tagzania:
http://www.tagzania.com/doc/about/tools/microformats/operator-geo.jpg
To install Operator, go to and download version 0.8 from here (that's
the one we've tested with the Tagzania userscript):
http://www.kaply.com/operator/operator.xpi
Then follow the how-to or instructions that we've put here:
http://www.tagzania.com/doc/about/tools/microformats
(you have to download a little bit of zipped code, unzip that and...
well, read that)
The Tagzania version of Operator locates addresses using the Google
Maps API geocoding option, but also the Yahoo Pipes geocoding service.
This last service lets us detect UK addresses when using Operator (see
http://www.tagzania.com/doc/about/tools/microformats/operator-adr-uk.jpg
) an option not available in the current Tagzania posting interface
(available for many countries, but not for the UK, so far). Accuracy
of address detection may vary, depending on how the address has been
microformatted.
Thank you very much, Tony