At Netconcepts I’ve implemented microformats in order to optimize content for search engines. An example of this would be the hCard microformat which we’re using in the Allen Edmonds store locator. If you view the source of http://www.allenedmonds.com/mens/allen-edmonds-in-brookfield.shtml and look for class=”vcard” you can examine how we’re marking up the content with classes like street-address and region. We’re hoping that this will be used for local search.

Today I was reading a post about a talk Rasmus Lerdorf (the creator of PHP who currently works at Yahoo) gave yesterday at DrupalCon where he mostly was talking about the performance of PHP frameworks. In the midst of this post I read something interesting.

Rasmus made a special point of highlighting the importance of embedding structured metadata into the page. RDFa allows you to embed data into your web pages and also lets you create custom vocabularies, or even better, reuse existing vocabularies. Why would you want to do this? SearchMonkey will go out and index this content and open up a rich search API to allow you to do intelligent queries. Well beyond what is possible with traditional search.

I know Netconcepts has started to experiment with SearchMonkey (I spoke on this topic at Web608) but this is the first I’ve really heard of RDFa. I’ve heard of RDF before (Resource Description Framework) but only in terms of XML documents (commonly used with RSS feeds). But what is RDFa? A quick look to Wikipedia says:

RDFa (or Resource Description Framework attributes) is a set of extensions to XHTML being proposed by W3C. RDFa uses attributes from XHTML’s meta and link elements, and generalises them so that they are usable on all elements. This allows you to annotate XHTML markup with semantics.

Has anyone been paying attention to this? I wonder how useful this could be in GravitySream. Since it’s an extension to XHTML I wonder if the site has to be valid XHTML in order to take full advantage of RDFa.

For more information on RDFa you can check out the RDFa Primer from the W3C and the original article I read Rasmus Lerdorf – PHP frameworks? Think again.

Today my iMac arrived. This is my first Mac so I’m pretty excited. I unboxed it at work because I didn’t feel like waiting until I got home after the Drupal Meetup tonight.

In one of our plants at work we have a strange little mushroom growing. It’s a couple inches tall and we don’t know what it is. If anyone out there is a mushroom expert I would be interested in knowing what sort of mushroom it is. Here are some pictures I’ve taken.

I’m back from San Francisco. The trip was awesome. Here are some more pictures.

For those of you that don’t know. I’m in San Francisco for a few days because on Saturday I’m attending Startup School at Stanford. So I took some extra days off so I could explore San Fran.

Today I got out to San Francisco without any issues. Had to get up at 3am though. Once I got checked into my hotel I figured I should hunt down a rental car facility so I could reserve a car for Saturday. Turns out, I’ll need to pick it up Friday and drop it off on Sunday because of their hours of operation.

Then I took a ride on the cable car to fisherman’s whorf where I visited the Musée Mécanique at Pier 45. It was pretty great. It was filled with all sorts of coin op fun. I played several pinball machines, some skeeball as well as looking at some of the entertaining machines.

Then I had some calamari and snapple and walked back to my hotel. Not too bad, only took about a half hour. Needless I was pretty pooped when I got back.

This is what I left on our break room table this morning.

E.G. Daily is my favorite musician. I absolutely love her music. A few years ago I flew out to L.A. just to see her one woman autobiographical musical “Listen Closely”. Her show was one of the best I’ve ever seen and it has truly inspired me to live my life to the fullest. She’s amazing. Well, she recently released a music video for her new single “Changing Faces” which is the title track from her upcoming album. This video is so good, I can’t stop watching it. I’m pretty sure E.G. is the sexiest and most talented women on the planet.

Changing Faces

I’ve also collected some links to classic E.G. videos. Here are the videos for “Say It, Say It”, “Love in the Shadows” and “Mind Over Matter”. I’ve also included a video from when she visited camp heartland.

Say It, Say It
Love in the Shadows
Mind Over Matter
E.G. Daily at Camp Heartland

And here is a clip from “Listen Closely”…
Listen Closely Sample

For more information about E.G. Daily you can read her page on Mahalo and Wikipedia
E.G. Daily on Mahalo
E.G. Daily on Wikipedia

And this is where you can buy her music.
Buy E.G. Daily’s Music

When I was a member of eMusic one feature they had that I absolutely loved was the ability to view artists by label. Now I’ve moved over to Rhapsody and I really miss this incredibly useful feature. To be able to do a search for artists on Kill Rock Stars or JDub Records would be really cool. This is a really good way to find new artists. If you know that a bunch of your favorite artists are on label xyz wouldn’t it make sense to see what other artists are on that label? Please Rhapsody, give us the ability to browse and search by label!

Some fun music videos I found surfing YouTube.

Stella Rocket – Animals
Like Honey – Airport
Oldfish – Dot Dot Dot
Portable Groove 09 – Rose Day
Blue Sorbet – Satisfy Me
Love is All – Make Out, Fall Out, Make Up
Junior Senior – Can I Get Get Get

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/drains-of-canada-interview-with-michael.html

I just came across this article today. It’s very interesting. I’ve always had an interest in exploring storm drains and tunnels and such. I wonder if Madison has drains like this. That would be really cool to see. I’d be worried about slipping and drowning though.