1. Aug 14th, 2005

    Textags WP Plugin

    I’ve talked about Textags before, a textual markup that makes it really easy to create microcontent. At last, the [first public version](http://labnotes.org/textags) is available for download.

    Brief Intro

    Textags are simple textual markups that use the first word in a line to indicate the meaning of what follows. They make it incredibly easy to create posts with rich data: events, people, tags.

    Textags are plain text, they work in your browser, your e-mail, you can SMS them or write them on a piece of paper. But on the Web they acquire special formatting that software (search engines, browsers) can understand.

    Example Textags:

    What: San Francisco Metroblogging Meet
    When: Friday, August 5, 2005 7:00 PM
    Where: House of Shields
    39 New Montgomery St.
    San Francisco, CA

    The beauty of Textags is in their simplicity. Just copy this text to your blog post, the text is enough to recreate the formatted event (assuming you’re using the plugin).

    WordPress Plugin

    Right now Textags are available for WordPress users. I wrote it and test it with WordPress 1.5, but it may work with older versions. The current version supports the relTag and hCalendar microformats. More Textags and probably hCard support is in the works.

    tags: textags wp-plugins microformats

    Printable PDF | Posted by Assaf Filed in announcements 9 Comments »

    1. Aug 14th, 2005

      Hellonline » Blog Archive » Text Tags

      [...] My friend Assaf writes about Textags: Textags are simple textual markups that use the first word in a line to indicate the meaning of what follows. They make it incredibly easy to create posts with rich data: events, people, tags. [...]

    2. Aug 15th, 2005

      Tantek

      Hi Assaf,

      It appears you may have independently re-invented RFC 822 header fields: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc822/rfc822.txt (e.g. view source on any internet email message).

      You may also want to take a look at YAML http://www.yaml.org/ which also contains a syntax like the one you came up with: http://yaml.org/spec/current.html e.g.

      hr: 65
      avg: 0.278
      rbi: 147

    3. Aug 15th, 2005

      Assaf

      Tantek,

      Due credit, it was other people who invented, I just decided to use. But it wasn’t RFC 822 or YAML. It was people sending me e-mails with textual markup in them, and the need to simply capture it.

      Textags don’t attempt to create a model, or devise an alternative to XML, but to simplify the human input part for some very common use cases. KISS and focus on the common usage.

      It makes it easier for me to tag posts, repost events, move the info around, etc. That’s a pretty serious benefit.

    4. Nov 5th, 2005

      amanda

      I can’t get it to work …

      Tags, ok. Links, Ok, but locations? No go.

      I am inching through the process of comparing your sample (which works) to my entries to figure out why mine don’t work. Findings so far:

      WORKS:
      Wednesday, November 16th, 2005 7:00 pm
      November 16th, 2005 7 pm
      November 16th, 2005 7pm

      FAILS:
      Weds, November 16th, 2005 7:00 pm
      November 16th, 2005, 7 pm

      So, don’t abbreviate the day-o-week, and watch out for extra commas…

      Extra linebreaks break textags, and if you don’t give a city and state the “Where” bits breakdown.

      Now that I got it working, I am a fan.
      Thanks, Assaf.

    5. Nov 11th, 2005

      Amanda

      Is it possible to force dates into a consistent format?

      What I secretly want (because abject laziness is always a secret) is to dump in events in whatever format I get them in and just tweak them enough that textags can read the meta data and be done.

      I still want every event to come out “Fri 11 Nov 2005″ whether I wrote 11/11/05 or November 11th 2005. It seems not unreasonable, since the date got extracted from whatever I put down already.

    6. Nov 17th, 2005

      Assaf

      it’s possible, but you’ll have to make a change to the code. the code parses the date (as best as it could), and holds on to the Date object and the original text. you can change it to format the Date, instead of just printing out the original text.

    7. Dec 12th, 2006

      Ali

      What I want to do on my blog, is every few hours take the oldest post and move it to the
      front of the queue, all automatically. Anyone know if there is a plugin that can do this or
      a simple way to set up another plugin to do this (use my own feed perhaps)?
      Thanks.

    8. Aug 18th, 2007

      aleph

      This is an interesting plugin. But could you provide some documentation on how the tags are used by Wordpress?

      Does Wordpress display either or both of the words preceding or following the colon in your post? That is, will someone who’s reading your blog see that information, or is it hidden from the reader and intended only for search engines and the like?

      Thanks!

    9. Aug 19th, 2007

      Assaf

      @aleph, the whole point is for the text you write to show up in the HTML as is. then you can copy the HTML, paste it in a different blog, and get the same HTML again.

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