Microformats test-suite concept 03 May 2008

I have been working on a concept for a new microformats test-suite. I need a comprehensive test-suite before I can move the development of UfXtract forward. Rather than just build something in isolation I thought it would be nice to find a way to share this work with the community.
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Semantic Camp London 19 February 2008

I spent this weekend at Semantic Camp learning all about RDF and speaking about parsing microformats. Although the focus of the event was very small, it attracted a nice group of people who were all passionate about open data portability in one way or another.
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Cake Friday vs HM Revenue & Customs  09 February 2008

A couple of weeks ago Madgex had a visit from HM Revenue & Customs to review our PAYE tax payments. While in the office they informed us that providing cake on a Friday maybe a taxable benefit. We received this judgement by letter.
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Making your social networking data portable - Marking up profiles and friends with mircoformats 03 December 2007

As the ideas of social media extends into the design of many modern websites, the addition of user profiles and friend lists are becoming more common. So what is the best practice for making your social network data portable with mircoformats.

Marking-up profiles and friend lists with mircoformats to any site is a relatively simple HTML coding process and involves the use of hCard and XFN. If you are not yet familiar with mircoformats I would recommend reading microformats.org/wiki/ for a quick overview.
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ufXtract’s portable social network parser 03 December 2007

After 14 months of talking about portable social networks at various events from SXSWi to a small geek dinner, I have finally found the time to build a working example.

ufXtract’s portable social network parser is a combination of the ufXtract microformats parser and a spider which follows rel=”me” links. It has been designed to extract profiles and friends lists from social networks and other sites which have microformats support. The parser returns two main collections of data, all the rel=”me” links and any hCard-XFN patterns.
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ufXtract microformats parser 25 November 2007

ufXtract is a new microformats parser I have built to help explore the real world issues of creating portable social networks. Although I have previously designed a number spiders that can find the most common hCard and XFN structures, this is my first full blown parser. It has been built from the ground up to take configuration objects which allow the parsing of different microformats or POSH patterns. It was important that I could parse more general patterns such as the joint hCard-XFN being promoted by the microformats community for use with friend’s lists.
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