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Yahoo! publishes 26.5 million Microformats

Posted by James | Filed under Geek, Semantic, Web

Just a couple of weeks ago Yahoo! announced that it would start to index semantic markup languages such as microformats in its search engine. That’s a huge win for the bottom-up approach to building the Semantic Web, and provides an incentive for publishers to adopt semantic markup like RDF and microformats. As a publisher, Yahoo! is also eating its own dogfood, and putting microformats to use on its own sites.

Yesterday, Yahoo! announced that it had begun using microformats on its European shopping search engine Kelkoo. Specifically, Yahoo! Europe pushed out the largest yet deployment of the draft hListing format, which is a new format used for marking up classified listings.

The actual number of hListings Yahoo! put out there was 26,456,448, as well as an additional 6,500 hCard listings describing merchants. "This bumper injection of structured data into Kelkoo’s pages makes it ripe for re-use, be that browser extensions to draw out product information on our pages, indexing services aggregating product listing together or mashing up the data for re-use in widgets," said developer Ben Ward of Yahoo! Europe.

Ward also indicated that Yahoo! hoped that other sites would adopt the hListing microformat. "After years of waiting for technology to move the web forward, it’s happening. There’s information out there now to pull off functionality we never had before. As web developers, there’s little to do but slip in microformatted mark-up wherever we can, and start having fun in consuming it," he said.

Tags: hlisting, microformats, semantic web, yahoo

Read more | Comments (0) | March 31st, 2008

Installing RMagick on Ubuntu

Posted by James | Filed under Code, Geek, Linux, Web

Here’s a very quick and easy way to install the RMagick Ruby gem to do some cool image manipulation and thumbnail management.

Install imagemagick & libraries

First install imagemagick on Ubuntu:

Check it’s installed:

Now install libmagick9-dev, making sure you choose the corresponding version for imagemagick *IF* asked (but you shouldn’t be):

Install Gem

Now the easy bit (and more stressful), installing the Ruby Gem:

After which you should see:

Include in your Ruby App

Now let’s use it, by adding to your controller/application_controller.rb:

Tada! Your ready to rock!

Tags: install rmagick, rails, rmagick, ruby, ubuntu

Read more | Comments (2) | March 17th, 2008

IE 8: Features Update

Posted by James | Filed under Future, Web

ie8readiness

Microsoft has put out the IE 8 Readiness Report that discusses the new features in the upcoming release of the Internet Explorer browser.

Ajax Improvements

Ajax Navigation enables users to navigate back and forth without leaving the Ajax application and could be used navigating a page without performing a traditional full navigation. This allows websites to trigger an update to browser components like the address bar by setting the window.location.hash value, firing an event to alert components in the page and even creating an entry in the travel log.
DOM Storage is a simple-to-use method for storing and retrieving strings of key/value pair data. Data can be stored per tab instance for a session or persisted to the local machine. This allows pages to cache text on the machine which reduces the effect of network latencies by providing faster access to pre-cached data. Several innovative uses are possible. For example, use this in combination with the new network connectivity event to allow a page to cache data if it detects the computer is offline.
Connectivity Events allow websites to check when the user is connected to the network and receive notification of connectivity changes.
6 Connections per Host instead of two for broadband scenarios and a scriptable property allow for more improved performance by allowing parallelisation of downloads in IE8. In addition, this increases functionality by ensuring a request is not blocked by a host if two connections already exist. Websites can optimise their downloads based on a scriptable property.
XMLHttpRequest Enhancements include a timeout property that can be set to cancel the request if necessary, allowing developers to manage the request better.
Cross-Domain Request (XDR) allows developers to create cross-site data aggregation scenarios. Similar to the XMLHttpRequest object but with a simpler programming model, this request called XDomainRequest, is the easiest way to make anonymous requests to third-party sites that support XDR and opt in to making their data available across domains. Three lines of code will have you making basic cross-site requests. This will ensure data aggregation for public sites (such as blogs) will be simple, secure and fast.
Cross-Document Messaging (XDM) APIs allow communication between documents from different domains through IFrames in a way that is easy, secure and standardised.

HTML & CSS

New Features

Activities are contextual menu options which quickly access a service from any web page. Users typically copy and paste from one web page to another. IE 8 Activities make this common pattern easier to do.
WebSlices is a new feature for websites to connect to their users by subscribing to content directly within a webpage. WebSlices behave just like feeds where clients can subscribe to get updates and notify the user of changes.

And we also have other feature such as less memory leaks!

What do you think?

Tags: enhancements, ie8, improvements, internet explorer browser, new features

Read more | Comments (0) | March 5th, 2008

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