I do most of my article gathering through Google Reader, which has a “share” option at the bottom of each article you read. If you follow me on Google, you probably get these articles in the “shared by others” category, but for those of you who don’t, I use the RSS feed of shared items that Reader puts out piped through an RSS to Twitter service (personally, I use TwitterFeed).

It’s not a perfect service, it will only push out articles every 30mins or so, but I find it more than adequate for my purposes. If something really great comes along and TwitterFeed isn’t an option, I sometimes push it out by hand to Twitter. And I actually think the 30mins delay is a good buffer so I don’t flood anyone’s Twitter stream with articles.

Google Reader also has a bookmarklet for things you want to share that’s outside your subscriptions. It’s very nice, I highly recommend it. You can get the RSS feed and “Note in Reader” bookmarklet from the “Share” tab down the left side of the page.

That’s how you get the Tweets formatted like “Currently reading” and “From CSSKarma”. I also recently hooked up Pandora, LastFM and YouTube to the services… so look out.

Web Design Mistakes

Duration: 3m 52s

Watching someone use a screen reader

Duration: 3m 31s

This is really boring but any designer/developer really should watch it.

SxSW 08 with Jeffrey Zeldman

Duration: 9m 12s

Design Coding

Duration: 3m 22s

Web Design in 2 Minutes

Duration: 2m 17s

CSS3 Rounded Corners

Duration: 3m 25s

ExpressionEngine 2.0 Preview

Duration: 7m 52s

Dan Rubin Singing Piano Man

Duration: 2m 55s

SxSW 2008 with Kevin Lawver

Duration: 9m 17s

Faster HTML and CSS: Layout Engine Internals for Web Developers

Duration: 1hr 1m

Because I’m a web dork (nice way to start a post, huh?), I was poking around YouTube last weekend and decided to crack it open in FireBug.

I was on YouTube’s MayerMusic channel fiddling around with the video info section and notice that some of the info was wrapped in a quasi familiar class “vfacets”. This appears to be some sort of Microformat; but none that I’ve ever seen.

After seeing that, I decided to do a little digging (digging = 5 mins of Googling), and eventually found a pretty undetailed page about group examples of Microformats.

Generally, I find that Google’s front end development is a disgrace to the Internet (no offense…), but it seems like they’re buying into the concept of Microformats. With that in mind I thought I’d talk about how Microformat groups could be used.

Usage

Many of us are familiar with the most common types of Microformats (hCalendar, hCard, hReview, and XFN). There are also many that are still in draft form like hResume, geo, and rel-directory. However, it seems that a new type could be emerging for grouping information.

The link above listed out 4 examples of major sites using Microformat groups: YouTube, Magnolia, Linkedin and Flickr. I really like how Google (youtube) is marking it up though, so I’m going to get in to that.

YouTube vEntry markup

<div class="v120vEntry">
<div class="vstill">
<a href="/user/spoiledmilk"><img src="2.jpg" class="vimg"></a>
</div>
<div class="vtitle">
<a href="/profile?user=spoiledmilk">spoiledmilk</a>
</div>
<div class="vfacets">
<span class="grayText">Joined:</span> August 02, 2006<br>
<span class="grayText">Videos:</span> <a href="/profile_videos?user=spoiledmilk">21</a>
</div>
</div>

In marking up user information they are using:

• ventry as a wrapper
• vstill for the user image link
• vimg for the image itself
• vtitle for the user’s name
• vfacets for, what seems to be, general information

I’m wondering why Google is going with this. In the past I think it’s safe to say that they don’t really do things like this unless they’re planning to use it in something they build. Not to take shots at Google, but they don’t really do things for the greater good of the web community (correct me if I’m wrong).

Consistent user tagging

The basis for using something like a vcard class is to let the browser, user, spambot, or software know that a page contains contact information (and your now beautifully marked up e–mail address). This same principle applies to Google’s vEntry.

Let’s consider that Google is building a large social networking platform; I know that the main complaint I have with all these new networking sites is that you have to constantly rebuild your contact list. Marking up a member’s information in a consistent way would aid in search and ease the pain of finding those Twitter followers (for example) we all love so much. Or even for building some sort of Internet phone book.

What are they scheming?

What’s Google planning? What else can be done with this new microformat? Did I completely miss a huge glaring detail here?

Maybe this isn’t even Google code, it could be left over from when they bought out YouTube. I guess we won’t know for sure until we can pick apart Google’s brain and find out what’s going on in there.

In the mean time, watch out for this new Microformat, I have a feeling they’ll be popping up in other Google sites as well.