The microformats meetup in San Francisco after An Event Apart had quite a turnout. The gathering was spoiled only by Jenn getting her purse stolen. Two evenings earlier, Noel had been robbed at gunpoint. San Francisco wasn’t exactly showing its best side.
Still, the microformats meetup was a pleasant get-together. Matthew Levine pulled out his laptop and gave me a demo of the Lazy Web in action…
On the first day of An Event Apart, I twittered a reminder that my liveblogging posts were filled with hCards. Christian asked how I added the hCards and I replied that, while I just add them by hand, some kind of “wizard” for adding simple hCards to any textarea would be very welcome.
Less than 48 hours later, Matthew had whipped up exactly what I asked for. It’s a bookmarklet. Drag it to your bookmarks bar and click on it whenever you want to add a simple hCard. It uses JavaScript to create a faux window with a form where you are prompted to enter given name and family name. You can also add a middle name and a URL.
This is just a small subset of all the properties available in hCard so it isn’t suitable for detailed hCards. If you’re creating the markup for a contact page, for example, you’d be better off with the hCard-o-matic. But this little bookmarklet easily hits 80% of the use cases for adding hCards within body text (like in a blog post, for example).
This is a first release and there will inevitably be improvements. The ability to add XFN values would be a real boon. Still… that’s really impressive work for something that was knocked together so quickly.
If you want to use the bookmarklet (regardless of what blogging engine or CMS you use), drag this to your bookmarks bar: