Validating your microformat pages

I posted some information about validating microformats over on the hRecipeHelper wiki but, I felt that it was worth a quick blog posting just to share with others that aren't likely to find a wiki page buried on Guthub!

I built a Chrome extension that will format recipes for blog postings using the hRecipe microformat and once done I wanted to test my results to make sure they were hRecipe friendly as well as to ensure that Google would find them tasty and digestible. To my surprise I did find a few very useful resources for the task.

The first handy resource is of course the microformat hRecipe where the specification is being defined. The format is a work in progress and currently I am supporting version 0.22 though I plan to continue to update the hRecipeHelper extension as the specification matures.

The second resource is a nice validation tool that Google has made available that will review your web page and try to parse out the hRecipe data as well as other microformats. It's simple to use, just paste any link into the form field on the page right here Rich Snippets Testing Tool and you'll see how it holds up. 

One cool thing about the testing tool is that not only will it validate your hRecipe formated pages but also many other microformats including hCard  which is the the markup spec for representing personal identification and hAtom, for blogs.

 Finally it you want to learn more about how Google interprets the hRecipe just take a look at their Recipe help page. If you cClick around a bit more and you'll find data element info for hCard as well. Happy microformatting, lets make a semantic web that's easier to discover and put to use!

hRecipeHelper - new Chrome Extension

A little while back Google announced a new Recipe Search function that can search just recipes and then filter the results on various components in the recipe as well as cook time and calories. Now that's how you can rapidly dissolve the agonizing question of "What's for dinner?" into immediate action! To do this Google is relying on a nifty standard called microformats and specifically in this case the hRecipe format.

What hRecipe provides is a standard of coding HTML which reveals to bots or other programs the exact meaning of the web pages content, specifically the data values it contains. As a programmer who has written website scraping programs more then once in the past, this sort of formatting is a wonderful and accessible way to publish data. Unfortunately HTML is not exactly everyone's best skill, in fact I am willing to bet that most people don't know HTML and would very much like to avoid ever knowing HTML. Honestly, those people are perfectly reasonable, why should they?

I started thinking of people I know who are advanced computer users who simply don't have the time or interest in learning to write web pages and realized that while microformats are freaking awesome to a developer they are still a bit demanding to the cook that just wants to share her favorite recipes with the world. I saw this as a chance to give a little something back to the blogging world and perhaps selfishly get even more great recipes turning up in Google's search. I've written a nifty Chrome Extension called hRecipeHelper to help recipe bloggers easily post nice looking; hRecipe (and Google) compliant recipes by simply filling out a recipe card and copying the code into their favorite blogging site. All the site needs to do is support posting of basic HTML which Blogger, LiveJournal and most other blog platforms support.

Click to get it now!

I hope this will help get even more recipes on the web and further the microformats cause.

The Garden Droid 1.0 Update

I started thinking that if anyone wanted to know more about how my Garden Droid was working out they would be left wanting because I'm not posting the updates to this blog. My logic is that this is my Tech blog for programming and Electronics and since this project leans towards my more green and leafy interested I have posted the updates on my other blog. If your interested click on over and check out my other blog.

Yes,  much could be debated on the logic behind 2 blogs... I debate it  often but, hey it makes some logical since none the less so I stick with it.