Sometimes conventions adopted by many unrelated sites across the web help make sites more friendly and familiar for visitors. That is certainly the case with adoption of the orange feed icon across the web.
It is such a good idea to develop ‘standard’ icons that there are now multiple ‘standard’ share icons and behaviors.
The later project started in part due to licensing and ownership issues with ShareThis’s graphics, which is something I’m sympathetic to, however at what point do we have too many conventions that the behavior of these conventions remains a mystery to visitors?
I was part of the OpenShareIcon project, mainly because I was asked to kick-off the graphic work, as previously I’d been a part of the GeoTag icon (GTI) project which started after an article I wrote and I think I/we are pleased with the outcome of the icons. I wasn’t really involved in the whys and wherefores of how the need for the new Share icon arose – others can fill you in there.
However, my primary concern at the outset of everything was GeoTagging to a map within Textpattern. After struggling with xml file driven maps I jumped over to WordPress and started to use the Geo-Mashup plugin (now rather neutered, as I link out to GMaps) but it still remains the only way I can see to place ICBM meta in the head of a post.
As a consequence of our efforts, iCab, the MinIMap plugin for Firefox and Flock, Newsgator amongst others have adopted the GTI (hopefully in NetNewsWire soon), which leads me into the real reason for this comment!
I have been messing around with your microformats Txp plugin and made it output the GTI to link to GMaps, but I fear I have ruined it’s microformats structure (if there really is one yet for geo) and wondered if you had any more thoughts on this format being able to write to the head of an article, or the way in which browsers could identify this within an article.
Microformats is an area that seems to have attracted some early attention, but then faded somewhat – NNW seems to be leading the pack on detection – perhaps the XPattern fork could be of interest to you? As I se the last post on the Txp forum thread was over a year ago :(
Cheers, David
Comment by: David @ Apr 20, 06:28 PM #I’ve put our original code back in – so both/either may be selected from the side list under the “write” tab and displayed together.
Comment by: David @ Apr 21, 05:24 AM #