Today was a great day in that I got to read two excellent write-ups of XFN. The first comes from Shirley Kaiser at Brainstorms and Raves: Friends, XFN, and Hyperlinks. The second came from Molly and it’s a mouthful: Integrated Web Design: Social Networking — The Relationship between Humans and Computers is Coming of Age. Molly’s article quotes me on pages 3 and 4, so watch out.
I suppose now is as good a time as any to announce this little tool I wrote for XFN about a month ago. Exefen (pronounced exy-fen) reads any public HTML page you give it and then returns every external link on the page with a XFN Creator widget attached to it. You can then go and add XFN values as appropiate just by clicking a few boxes. Then when you submit that data exefen returns the original page source with all the XFN data added. Some features:
- Works with all reasonably formed XHTML and HTML, different quoting styles etc.
- Parses any existing rel values and uses those
- Preserves formatting, etc in original document
- Ignores internal and relative links
It could probably do more, and reasonable requests will be entertained. This tool was actually made in response to a comment by Zeldman saying he didn’t have time to add XFN values to his externals page. Using this tool he did it in less than an hour. In his words, “Fabulous! Great tool.” Are you XFN friendly yet?
I’m XFN friendly, and damn proud of it. *nods* I’ve been teaching some of my friends who are getting used to their new WordPress blogs how to add links, and XFN is part of the little tutorial. =)
Fabulous tool! Wrote it up on my blog, too. Thanks for sharing this with the world! XFN is fun, easy, and useful enough that search engines should start accumulating this data as well [obviously Rubhub.com already does].
Can we have the option for exefen produce an output that uses double quotes instead of just single quotes? Yes, we know single quotes are XHTML compliant, but the majority of the industry uses double quotes on all attribute values, so why go aginst the grain? Thanks!
I wonder why BlogRolling doesn’t support this