Using hReview with WordPress

One very fcool feature of Digg is that anything on the site has a RSS feed. You can access any page, even through search results, and grab an RSS feed for it. Being a longtime user of Google Reader , I decided to add the ” Coldfusion ” search term to Google in an attempt to see what others in the CF community are Digging. There is a definitely lack of front page stories about Coldfusion, so voting up the interesting articles from this feed is an easy way of promoting the good submissions. I’m all for skipping over most of course, I’m not for voting up everything, but some articles, such as Coldfusion for the JSP Developer is just what would be great to get out to the Digg masses. Usually when it comes to sites like Digg I end up only digging, rather than submitting though. Most my submissions are to Del.icio.us via the Firefox plugin. It’s an excellent way of sharing bookmarks between computers, and it helps my bookmarks folder stay manageable. aBack in January I mentioned a hReview plugin for WordPress that I’ve been using primarily for book reviews. But what exactly is hReview? According to Microformats.org:

hReview is a simple, open, distributed format, suitable for embedding reviews (of products, services, businesses, events, etc.) in (X)HTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML. hReview is one of several microformats open standards.

To put it in english, it’s a way of using semantic XHTML to write a review. The prime example is Cork’d a wine review site developed by Dan Cederholm . Take the sample code on the left. It’s from a review on Cork’d and illustrates the structure of an hReview (and also a vcard if you’re curious). The basics of it are shockingly simple and entirely based on the css classes. Almost all the class declarations in the sample code are hReview related and then then marked up via CSS to look stylish. The benefits of hReview, as with OpenID and other microformats are yet to be fully realized. Technorati has taken a leading role in some Microformats as well as being one of the first to start a hReview, hCalendar and hCard search over at Kitchen.technorati.com . I can confirm it’s working with a search for ColdFusion turning up two of the books I recently reviewed. As a publisher or as consumer having a standard for this kind of thing is a godsend. If you’re wanting to learn a little more about microformats, Jason Allsopp recently released a book on the subject: Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 . There’s two very comprehensive reviews on Amazon, as well as more evangelizing on Allsopp’s site. If you’re writing reviews, give hReview a try!