My adventure with microformats on rails

My adventure with microformats on rails:

So after listening to all of the SXSW podcast I decided that I need to try something new namely microformats they seem like such a cool piece of tech and I wanted in on it too. I started looking around at these weird little things called microformats. I found out that they were just a simple little XHTML snippets but there is a standard of markup, I won't go into to much detail about that so for my contact info I would mark it up like such:

<div id="hcard-Chris-S.-Maness" class="vcard">
 <span class="fn n">
    <span class="given-name">Chris</span>
  <span class="additional-name">S.</span>
  <span class="family-name">Maness</span>
</span>
 <a class="email" href="mailto:chrisprayingmantis@yahoo.com">chrisprayingmantis@yahoo.com</a>
 <div class="adr">
  <div class="street-address">Maness Hollow Ln.</div>
  <span class="locality">Blackwater</span> , 
  <span class="region">VA</span> , 
  <span class="postal-code">24221</span>
  <span class="country-name">USA</span>
 </div>
 <div class="tel">+1 555 999 2002</div>
 <a class="url" href="aim:goim?screenname=prayingmantis207">AIM</a>
 <a class="url" href="ymsgr:sendIM?chrisprayingmantis">YIM</a>
</div>

Now this is just a standard way of marking up the data that you already have inside of your site so that other applications can accessing your data easier. So adding it into your site is so easy I don't see why we couldn't start building this stuff right in from the start. Now I've got you wondering "Which applications can use these pieces data?" as of right now there are not to many apps that can use that have been developed yet (that I know of). Technorati is one of these few apps that searches blogs and looks for microformats in the process. Just having these microformats in there gives us a ton of functionality to use. Speaking of that let us take a look at a rails plugin that helps us to read these little pieces of information.

As you all may know I am a ruby on rails fanatic and I'm always ready to try something new. So I started looking around the net for a ruby gem or a ruby plugin that could read microformats , lo and behold I stumbled ac ross this plugin for rails called mofo (what a horrible pun). So I decide to take a look at it, and I've got to say it works pretty good but not as well as I would like it to, the only thing it won't do so far is read tags off of your own rails app (I found that little odd but I can work with that.). So all in all this looks really good so far. I'll keep looking for more interesting stuff for my next post.

The real guide for getting up and running with rflickr

OK so a project I'm working on now is using the flickr api to get pictures, so my team looked around the web for a good library for ruby and at last we found rflickr. Rflickr has very little documentation except for Max Dunn's tutorial witch I borrowed some from so here's how I did it

First create a new rails project:

%> rails myapp
%> cd myapp

Now lets make sure we have the latest version of the gem installed

%> sudo gem install rflickr

Make sure you install all of the required dependencies
Now we're ready to get started open the ruby console

%> script/console
Loading development environment.

now we make sure we require the flickr library

>> require 'flickr'

now set your api key and your shared secret

>>API_KEY = "your_api_key_here"
>>SHARED_SECRET = "your_secret_here"

now we start flickr up don't forget to include the path to flickr.cache

>>flickr = Flickr.new ("/tmp/flickr.cache", API_KEY, SHARED_SECRET)

now we get the frob,

>>flickr.auth.getFrob

and generate the login link.

>>flickr.auth.login_link('write')

now copy that link into your browser and allow it
Now all that's left to do is to get the token and cache the token

>>flickr.auth.getToken
>>flickr.auth.cache_token

Rock on now we're up and running...so we got this flickr think so ummm what can we do with it. Well lets try it on something simple shall we? First restart the console, then we just have a few steps instead of all of those steps all over again.

Set your api key and your secret
>>API_KEY = "your_api_key_here"
>>SHARED_SECRET = "your_secret_here"

Then load your environment and the token.

>>flickr = Flickr.new("/tmp/flickr.cache", API_KEY, SHARED_SECRET)
>>flickr.auth.token

Lets try a simple function first. Let's get a users tags.

>>flickr.tags.getListPhoto('269619243')

The rest of the api is straight forward. It's just like the flickr api. If you have any topics that you find interesting or want to learn about and I'll try to post them here. As always you can contact me at chrisprayingmantis@yahoo.com. I would love to hear from anyone who is reading this blog.