Having downloaded Brian Suda’s Microformat Cheat Sheet, I had been methodically adding XFN and hCard info to previous blog posts by messing under the hood in split/code view. All very tedious. As I added similar stuff for the nth time, I was just thinking, “wouldn’t it be nice if some clever type had written a DW extension to do this…”
No sooner thought, than found – more or less by accident, I’ve just discovered the Microformats Extension for Dreamweaver8 at the WaSP website. Now it really is a no-brainer to add Microformats to any page.
After installing the extension, you get the Microformats tab appear at the end of the Insert Bar:
The first icon gives you the hCal dialogue box:
Fill it in, and lo! and behold, you get the relevent hCal code in your page:
<div class=”vevent”>
<a class=”url” href=”http://www.mypub.com”>
<abbr
class=”dtstart” title=”20070101T1200″> January 01, 2007 – 12:00 </abbr> – <abbr class=”dtend” title=”20070101T2344″> 23:44 </abbr> – <span class=”summary”> My Birthday </span> – at <span lass=”location”> down the pub </span> </a>
<div class=”description”> Let’s meet for a few New Year drinks! </div>
</div>
Next up is the icon for hCard, and pushing the button gives us:
Which produces:
<div class=”vcard”> <a class=”url fn” href=”http://www.carolinemockett.com/”>Caz Mockett</a>
<div class=”org”>Freelance</div>
<div class=”adr”> <span class=”locality”>Chelmsford</span>, <span class=”region”>Essex</span> </div>
</div>
The third icon is for the rel-licence attribute:
giving the very simple
<a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/” rel=”license”>some rights reserved</a>
The little “luggage tag” icon gives us the rel-tag dialogue (of course):
which gives us
<span class=”technoratitag”>
<a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/microformats” rel=”tag”>microformats</a> </span>
Finally, the dizzy-looking heads icon is for the XFN widget, which really is very neat indeed:
giving us this little code snippet:
<a href=”http://www.sheilafarrell.com” rel=”met colleague friend”>Sheila Farrell</a>
Fab. All of a sudden, my life has become easier. Drew, you’re a genius!