In the little bits of spare time I’ve had in the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on a new plugin for WordPress. LinkedIn hResume for WordPress grabs the hResume Microformat block from your LinkedIn public profile page allowing you to add it to any WordPress page and apply your own styles to it.
Ever since I attended the Web Directions North conference a few weeks ago, I’ve been thinking a lot about microformats and practical uses. In fact, I’m already working out the details for my next WordPress plugin involving microformats.
I have to confess, I kind of cheated a bit with this release of LinkedIn hResume. It doesn’t do any parsing. It just uses regular expressions peel away the junk around the hResume block of markup. I did check out some PHP microformat parsers but either they didn’t support hResume or they required some non-standard PHP module. I was impressed with hKit but it requires PHP 5 (which I’m starting to think is good enough). I started to work a bit with DomIt! but gave up because LinkedIn’s XHTML does not validate and doesn’t parse well. I’ve since found out I could just run it through Tidy first, so I may give it another shot. I’ve also been considering the advantages of writing a recursive descent parser specifically tuned for microformats. We’ll see.