Four calling cards, OK so it’s cheesy but this whole advent thing is a pretty cheesy excercise that I just felt like challenging myself with.

The hCard microformat is an XHTML adaptation of the vCard standard, it is used for representing people, companies, organizations, and places. Here are four resources to get started and make the most of hCard.

hCard Creator

Starting with the simplest resource, microformats.org’s hCard creator simply requires you to fill out the forms and then copy and paste the generated code into your web page.

hCard Validator

Once you’ve created your hCard formatted content, you can use this unofficial validator to make sure it checks out OK. Options to check fragments or entire pages make this a nice flexible option.

Technorati Contacts Feed Service

For a simple way to extract hCard information from a web page for use in your contacts application, Technorati provide this simple service to scrape a webpage for any hCard formatted contact information and returns a vCard file which is compatible with most contact managers (email clients etc.).

Operator Firefox Extension

This Add-on for the Firefox browser will alert you to the presence of several different types of microformat and offer actions for each one depending on which format is found. This is a useful tool for research, making data gathering a much quicker process.

Tomorrow’s post – Mobile Web Resources.