Mike’s Musings

Pingback from Operator 0.8a is Available at notizBlog
Date: June 5, 2007, 5:19 am

[…] Eine Alpha-Version von Operator 0.8 (ein Microformats Firefox-Plugin) ist seit gestern verfügbar. […]

Pingback from microformats.dk » Blog Archive » Operator 0.8 er frigivet
Date: June 5, 2007, 10:55 am

[…] Michael Kaply har i går frigivet Operator 0.8 plugin til Firefox (jeg har tidligere skrevet om Operator 0.7 versionen). Plugin’en, der er udviklet til at genkende websider, der er blevet opmærket med microformats. Hvis du er i Firefox nu, så klik på dette link for at installere Operator 0.8 plugin. Dernæst genstarter du Firefox, og der er nu installeret en toolbar i din Firefox . En god opsætning er følgende (også pga. jeg beskriver microformats eksempler i denne opsætning) Gå til Options>General og vælg så de samme options som du ser i nedenstående billede. […]

Comment from Laurens Holst
Date: June 5, 2007, 1:06 pm

I just tried out Operator…

First: if there are tags, you should filter out the duplicates. See http://rdfa.info/ for a test.

Second: the bar is always taking up screen space, even when there are no microformats. It would be cool if it would only show if there were microformats found, or maybe show up as a balloon popup or something. That would free up the space, and make the microformats more discoverable.

Nice extension tho :).

~Grauw

Pingback from microformatique - a blog about microformats and “data at the edges” : Operator 0.8 released
Date: June 5, 2007, 9:01 pm

[…] Michael Kaply’s fantastic Operator extension for Firefox, which presents users with an array of functionality to do with the microformats it finds on a web page just got upgraded to 0.8. […]

Comment from Raymond
Date: June 6, 2007, 1:17 am

I’m using operator more & more and even using microformats in my websites..
great stuff.

@grauw: there is an option in operator: “Display icon in status bar”.
then you will get a green + in your status bar when there are microformats in the page and form the + you will be able to access them.

if you have the + then you can disable the toolbar

Comment from Ben Croxogod
Date: June 6, 2007, 2:11 am

Same problem. The duplicated entries are annoying.
One more. It lacks of support to 8bit+ characters, still.

In fact there have been to many ill formed rel-tag micro-formats. Some blog-ware use rel-tag without ensuring pretty permalinks. That leads to empty tags or even worse. I think at least the empty tags should be filtered out, and so the duplicated items.

To present as a big tool bar or to act as a small icon, just like Tails Export, is a matter of opinion. I would accept either.

Thanks for your update!

Comment from dartar
Date: June 6, 2007, 3:25 am

Mike, I’ve just installed 0.8a and everything seems to work fine.
As a feature suggestion, are you considering adding support for rel=”license” anytime soon? Assuming that:

1) many websites already tag content with license information (either via a rel attribute or embedded RDF);
2) there’s an increasing number of communities concerned about IP,

my feeling is that this could be the killer proof-of-concept of what Operator can do with existing content (as opposed to the-Web-we-dream-of).

Ideally, it’d be great to see icons in the Operator toolbar displaying the kind of license that applies to the current content. But a simpler implementation (with drop-down menus and links to licenses) would also work great as a starter.

What do you think?

Comment from mkaply
Date: June 6, 2007, 8:16 am

Hmm. I’m not seeing the duplicated entries. http://rdfa.info/ gives me 7 tagspaces (14 if I turn off removing duplicates in prefs). Can you give me some more examples:

Ben: What do you mean by lack of 8bit+ characters?

As far as removing certain tags, again, if you could give me some examples, I’ll try to remove them.

dartar: I’ve thought about rel=”license” but I couldn’t come up with the UI for it. It would be easy to add a dropdown that simply linked to the licenses. I’ll write it as a proof of concept today.

Comment from mkaply
Date: June 6, 2007, 9:13 am

Just for fun (and to show how easy writing microformats/actions is), I wrote a user script for license.

http://www.kaply.com/weblog/operator-user-scripts/

Right now it only handles Creative Commons well. Try it out.

Comment from Ben Croxogod
Date: June 6, 2007, 10:23 am

Oh! You are right, I have forgotten to turn on “Remove Duplicates …”
That works!

For 8bit+ Characters, think about UTF-8 , UTF-32, UCS-2, Big5, JIS and so.
Show as this link in my blog
http://blog.bencrox.info/2007/06/06/ie-is-bad%ef%b9%90firefox-not-so-good%ef%bc%9f/
the %ef%b9%90 is in fact a comma in UTF U+FE50 ( Small comma, full width ) .

ScnShot : http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1129/533377738_b1024ebb50_b.jpg

In this post, there are two link with rel-tag that contains Traditional Chinese characters. I don’t use non-English tags unless for test purpose, however, there are lots of East Asian blogs showing up non-English categories and thus non-English rel-tags.

I have only tested FF 2.0.0.4 in WinXP SP2 ( lang = zh_TW / lang = zh_CN / lang = japanese ) at this moment. Could not sure will it work in Linux/BSD/Mac .

With the broken characters, I can still do niche searches. But the search results are shown in broken form as well. That means things are not working pretty well.

Pingback from Ben Crox on Blog » rel-tag -> Operator Extension (FF)
Date: June 6, 2007, 10:56 am

[…] 正在研究 Microformats, 剛好 Michael Kaply 釋出了 Operator 0.8a 版, 可以使 firefox 更方便地引用 microformats 來做 niche search/actions . […]

Comment from mkaply
Date: June 6, 2007, 11:03 am

Ben:

This was simply a bug. I was using “escape” instead of “decodeURIComponent”

I have fixed this now.

Comment from Ben Croxogod
Date: June 6, 2007, 11:06 am

And some more suggestions,

1. When locates in the status bar, it is better to always allow people to click for option, even if no microformats have been found.

2. You provide the dot-js user-scripts on line, so why don’t let people to paste the link to include ( or even aggregate) new user-scripts ? Yes, for me, I would like to review the code before installing them, but ordinary users want quick tricks.

Comment from mkaply
Date: June 6, 2007, 11:19 am

1. The status bar thing is an interesting thing I hadn’t thought of. Should the icon be disabled but a menu still appears? That will be confusing for users.

2. I assume you mean allow users to paste the URL when adding user scripts. I have some other ideas for how loading user scripts will work. I’m working on that.

Thanks for your feedback

Comment from dartar
Date: June 6, 2007, 11:25 am

> I wrote a user script for license.

brilliant, thanks, I’ll try to play with user scripts myself soon

BTW I now understand one of the reasons for Alex Faaborg’s argument in favour of displaying microformatted data in the page content as opposed to a toolbar approach. This might be especially useful for pages containing multiple items tagged with different licenses (I guess the toolbar would be not very useful in this case).

Comment from Ben Croxogod
Date: June 6, 2007, 11:54 am

Hmm, a bit strange.

Now if I choose Actions as the Display Style, duplications returns.

For the decodeURIComponent fix, I think I could not test it unless a new version of the xpi is provided. I have to go to sleep now, otherwise, I could try to change it myself.

Anyway, thanks to Michael!

Comment from Ben Croxogod
Date: June 6, 2007, 12:09 pm

A simple case showing how bloggers could break the rel-tag microformat.
Quote a blog post I have to just read:

http://blog.tiney.com/?p=995

( It does not matter what language / encoding the content provides. The problem comes form wordpress without pretty permalink )

There should be three different rel-tags, as the rendered page clearly shown. However, the href attribute ends in “?cat=XXXX”, which is invalid. As a result, operator shows 1 tag, that is “false”.

Will it be better to show nothing, or … read the embedded text inside a-rel-tag in this case ?

Comment from dartar
Date: June 9, 2007, 4:08 am

FYI, I’ve added Operator to ohloh:

http://www.ohloh.net/projects/5849

Pingback from Technikwürze » Technikwürze 76 - Von der Idee zum Storybord
Date: June 11, 2007, 12:32 am

[…] Wer mit Mikroformaten rumspielt, sollte sich den neuen Mikroformate Plugin Operator 0.8 runterladen. […]

Comment from Nolendil
Date: June 14, 2007, 9:13 am

Could you make it compatible with SeaMonkey ?
Thanks.

Trackback from rn7.net/b
Date: June 14, 2007, 4:32 pm

Amusons nous avec RDFa… et Operator

Il n’y a pas que Gautier Poupeau qui s’amuse avec RDFa ! Ce dernier le fait avec briot dans un article, comme toujours, on ne peut plus clair, didactique et accessible. Pour de viles raisons matérielles, je vais être beaucoup plus court et tec…

Pingback from microformats.dk » Dansk Operator 0.8 Users Scripts version 2 udgivet
Date: July 1, 2007, 12:40 am

[…] Jeg har tilføjet ekstra funktionalitet til mit danske Users Scripts til Michael Kaplys Operator 0.8 plugin til Firefox. Nu understøtter mit User Scripts danske kortservices som Findvej.dk, Google Maps Danmark og Eniro Kort. Hvis der genkendes websider, der er opmærket med microformats adr (adresser, en del af et hCard) samt geo, så kan du pege hen på en af ovennævnte 3 danske kortservices. […]

Pingback from Mike’s Musings » Operator 0.8b is Available
Date: July 3, 2007, 9:57 am

[…] All the caveats from Operator 0.8a apply, so please read them. […]

Comment from Daniel O’Connor
Date: July 4, 2007, 4:36 am

Operator is awesome - it’s pushed me to deploy microformats across our work application.

My only frustration is that since we use many bits of UI opened with window.open(), operator is effectively unavailable - no operator toolbar.

Pingback from Traces of Inspiration » Blog Archive » A Few Things I Learned About the vCard Spec Tonight
Date: July 18, 2007, 8:13 pm

[…] So, I’m trying to code this hCard so I can run it through Operator or the hCard parser on Technorati and then pull that vCard into Address Book. So, I code it, but I notice that I’m having issues with the mobile phone number, websites, and email addresses. Mobile was importing as “Other”, websites were all importing simply as “home page” (not part of the spec), and all email addresses were importing as “work”. This was frustrating because I could then edit them in Address Book to be home, work, mobile, whatever. But I wanted it to happen automatically when converted. […]

Comment from Paul Kinlan
Date: August 27, 2007, 3:50 pm

Hi,
I have been using Operator to test the microformats produced by my site (example http://www.topicala.com/tag/pullshapes). I have changened the hCard format so that Operator picks up contact information.

However I noticed that it doesn’t seem to parse a vcard stytled like: Paul Kinlan which I believe is valid.

Kind Regards,
Paul Kinlan

Comment from mkaply
Date: August 27, 2007, 9:10 pm

Paul:

I assume you mean the place where you have class=”vcard fn” ?

fn must be a child of vcard.

Comment from Paul Kinlan
Date: August 28, 2007, 6:36 am

Good point. I just rechecked the spec.

I swear I was following examples when I decided on that format
Anyway, I will change my site.

Cheers,
Paul.