August 22
hNotSoFun
Holy microformats batman! I don’t know how useful it is posting from your blog in microformats like I just did. If everyone else out there had something like the operator plugin you’d be able to see the event appear on planet gnome and add the event to your respective calendaring tool (google, yahoo, evo?).
However since I somewhat doubt that most people are actually using this toolbar or working with microformats in anyway it’s just a bit frustrating. I understand you could argue that if everyone starts using them that they’ll be accepted and adopted and our lives would be grand, but this is the default argument for almost every new technology… right?
So what’s the not so fun part here?
Even though I grabbed the plugin from Structured Blogging to help me create the microformat, the interface for entering the information was terrible. I can easily accept that initial interface designs are bad, this is a large part of my life, and that given time it will probably get better. However if you want people to use microformats it should be simpler that not using them. And hey, creating interfaces is the “fluffy stuff“, which is why all interfaces are easy to use and it must be weak kernel programming that is really holding us back.
The other part that really sucks right now about this microformat posting is that I have to create an entire entry for the microformat. Really what I want to do is have a small block inserted at the bottom of my post with the microformat details. Creating a new single entry for each event, review, list, or media isn’t how I’d like to use this.
And it might as well be in a table since planet and most feed aggregation rips out any CSS styling, I’d rather not have the hCalendar entry sprawl out large and ugly like it is. But still using tables is probably what always gets me nasty looks from the web 2.0 types, oh well!
I guess since I’m a wordpress hacker now, I should just go ahead and fix these things I’m complaining about.
Why not just have the operator plugin guess events or allow for user selection of text, links, etc. to be used for guessing. Many things would not even be a guess, i.e. any email addresses, web links, etc. that are already known could be shown as action items in the appropriate categories of the operator tool bar.
Also, your “Structured Blogging” link is slightly broken.
Right now it guesses events and other things via the microformat structure. To just guess at events without the microformats is possible, but really difficult. You can see this in GMail where they try to provide a “Add to Calendar” link when they can recognize an event in your email, however even they can’t be very accurate with it. But at least emails and links are structured such that you could easily detect them, but because of that there’s usually already an action associated with them.
Fixed the link, thanks!