Microformat madness, and introducing Zemanta

I’ve been going through some of the older blog posts on the site, as well as some of the other pages here, with a purpose. I’ve known about microformats for a while, but recently I’ve been working on putting them to use on the site, and give me more reasons to play around with Mike Kaply's excellent Operator extension for Firefox. (I’ve also been updating book links with my Amazon affiliate code, but that’s another story.)

From what I gather, microformats are a great way to improve the semantic qualities of the web, as well as pack in even more information on sites and pages in a way that makes it easier to pull from the net and use elsewhere. For example, the hCards set up on the front page of the site and the about page can easily be added to your address book if you use Internet Explorer 8, or exported to vCard (or certain online address books) using Firefox and Operator. Other microformats make it simple to look up a place on a map, or search for similarly tagged articles on the internet. (Drupal actually provides support for a tag microformat out of the box, IIRC.)

I’m now also beginning to make use of Zemanta, an interesting looking online service that I recently asked about here on the blog. Nobody gave me any opinions, so impatiently I installed the Live Writer plugin, which has seen a bit of use in writing this post. I don’t know if it’s because I’m using the latest technical preview, but the Zemanta plugin kind of sucks. It doesn’t match the style of Live Writer at all, and preferences seem to be stored on Zemanta’s website rather than locally. And, to bring up the options page, it ends up stealing a whole bunch of CPU spread over a number of processes that are spawned by a service process. Never mind the tens of empty paragraphs that end up being inserted every time I try doing anything with it.

Very, very odd. Perhaps I’ll have better luck if I switch to the Drupal module, but I prefer having control over my posts as I type them, not having to work on them afterwards.