Racing on Rails

I just deployed the newest version of mtbcalendar.com (revision 137 for those of you following at home) which adds the first bits of microformats code support. For those of you not down with the semantic web, microformats are "are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards." Think of it as HTML that gives your browser/computer hints about what the text actually means. The microformat that I have decided to start with is hCalendar. So now if you go to each detailed event page (like this weekend's CCCX DH #4), the event's dates will be marked up as hCalendar.

What does this mean to you ?

Maybe something, maybe nothing. If you have a microformats enhanced browser, you will be able to recognize the hCalendar events and quickly add them to your calendar (be it iCal, Google calendar, Y! calendar, etc). If you don't, you won't notice anything.

Getting a microformats enhanced browser is easy:

• Download and use Firefox beta 3
• Install the "Operator" extension to Firefox (v2)
• Grab this bookmarklet for IE 6 & 7 (IE 8 will support it natively)
• Use Flock (which has built in support)
• Use the Safari Microformats plugin (which seems to have a few problems with my encoding)
• Use "tails" extension for Firefox

Let me know if you have any problems with this.