Microformats on Mix 09 Website

The Mix 09 website is making some clever use of Oomph. What is Oomph? It is a Microformats toolkit by Microsoft. And what are Microformats?

Microformats are about enhancing the web, representing data in HTML and moving that data around. Oomph: A Microformats Toolkit is for web developers, designers and users, making it easier to create, consume, and style Microformats. In short, Oomph makes consuming and producing content for the web just a little easier, more efficient, more fun.

In short, Microformats, or rather Oomph adds a whole new dimension of interaction with websites. It lets you create a very visually pleasant and unobtrusive way of displaying your data. The data can range from events, to contact cards and mapping locations. All that without making the user leave your website, or navigate to some other link on you website. Straight from the Mix team:

With the momentum of Microformats burgeoning, we decided to build Oomph: A Microformat Toolkit. Our main goal with Oomph is to make Microformats more accessible for developers and designers. Oomph is an amalgamation of applications: an Internet Explorer Add-in built in C++ that finds Microformats on a page; a cross-browser HTML overlay built using JQuery that aggregates Microformats; a set of beautiful CSS styles for Microformats; and a Windows Live Writer plug-in written in WinForms for inserting hCards. And, the entire project is up on Codeplex, ready for community contribution and extensibility.

Oomph is open source, part of the Mix lab, and available for download. The Oomph toolkit makes it a piece of cake to create your own Microformats and insert them in your blog using Windows Live Writer. Here’s my contact card, a sample event and a sample location which should be available at the click of the gleam showing in the upper right corner of this blog as well.

This is a very simple look for the cards which can be customized to look flashy and more appealing, such as this: I’ll be doing an easy to understand tutorial shortly on how to create and customize your own Microformats for your blog using Oomph.