boogdesign posts

A while back I made some buttons for various microformats, then discovered the official home for them and so added them into the wiki. This has had the side effect that many naive developers simply copy and past the code for the button from the wiki into their pages and then use the image hosted on my website. It's not a big problem for me - the image is small and it gets cached for a month whenever someone requests it so not massive bandwidth, and it's mostly just blogs and small sites which do it. Or so I thought...

This was brought to my attention this evening as I was switching my default from PHP 4 to PHP 5 and then breaking everything by putting invalid entries into my .htaccess file. After I was done I checked the error log and noticed several errors with a referrer of comet.co.uk, I went to look at the referring page and, sure enough, there was my hcard button. You'd think they'd be able to afford to host their own rather than leeching my bandwidth, but times are tough

I thought I'd do a little anecdotal analysis of hcard adoption so I downloaded the December log file. There were 76936 requests for microformat_hcard.png in December, 58792 from Comet - by far the most common. Next up was microformats.org itself with 8661, then one (apparently) very prolific blogger with 3715. There were a few smaller sites with a noticeable number of requests - a New Zealand electricity supply contractor had 85 hits while hcard is also popular among German universities with Universität Potsdam scoring 307 hits and Universität Bielefeld with 172 hits in what looks like an intranet application.

So not very meaningful in the grand scheme of things, but it is clear from the slightly eclectic set of sites I've listed above that Microformats and hcard in particular have seen adoption across a broad range of different websites. Hopefully we'll see more and more services which take full advantage of all this semantic data.