I will be providing my users with code generated as links or images to embbed on different websites or on their personal.
Ok so normal generated code would look something like:
<img src=""></img>
And this would work on any website where you can post html or on users personal site.
But what to generate when user would like to post this kind of code generated to forums?
I know there isn't any universal tags for ALL forums for images and links, but what tags are used on most of forums?
I saw tags like:
[URL="foo"][/URL]
[url:foo][/url]
So the question is what to generate when this kind of code would be used to be posted in forums, or to provide users with src and href links and post some kind of tutorial?
According to Wikipedia, BBCode is the most common markup for use in bulletin board/forum software. If I were to choose one to support for this type of app, that is the one I would pick.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBCode
Having said that, each forum is different, so it would probably be worth your while to a) find out which forum(s) your users most commonly post on, and support those forums' markup formats, and b) make it very clear what type of forum markup they are generating so you aren't helping them violate the posting guidelines of their favorite forum.
Related
There are some cases when you want to get a most representative image
of a web page, e.g. Pocket would try to add an image when you collect
a web page.
How would you define, in a programmatic way, which image is the key
image?
What would be the most appropriate way to do so?
Most websites that are seeking to be shared on sites like Facebook or Pocket will have an Open Graph protocol image. This is often an image in the head tag that uses the format <meta property="og:image" content="http://URL-TO-YOUR-IMAGE" />. The Open Graph protocol is used and looked for by companies such as Facebook, Pocket, Reddit, and has become fairly widespread in use.
For websites that do not follow such a standard, developers will often use a third-party tool such as Embedly, which has already solved the problem. Simply feed it a URL and it will return you some information on what content would be good for your thumbnail-ified images.
If you're wanting to create your own engine, you may want to study into DOM positioning analytics, and try to find your own algorithm by scraping many, many articles and web pages to try and find good patterns.
Study scraper.py to see how reddit uses BeautifulSoup to find representative images from links submitted to it.
I have been spending my past week on the Internet to find at least one hint about it. There are no tutorials or even SO questions available. What I am trying to find is that when some website uses some library like oEmbed to embed content of other websites on their website, they fetch embed code from its link. For example, when you post a YouTube link on Facebook or other social networks, they automatically fetch their embed code. I know how to fetch embed code but what I don't know is how to provide embed code that can be fetched by other websites by using a link of my website's content?
I want that my article should be embedded in some special way. Not like the default layout of that website. So is there any META tag or something in HTML where I can put embed code for other websites?
I don't think what you want is possible. You can use special meta-tags that specific sites (e.g.: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin) will interpret, and that will help you customize the share a little (still using the "host site" style). But as far as I know, there's nothing you can do to provide style/code of your own.
And it makes sense from a security point of view: embedding external code from an unknown source is potentially dangerous and no site would/should allow you to do it. Even if they do allow it, they should pre-process the code and sanitize it (adapting your style/code to their style/code) to prevent possible threats.
As suggested by Alvaro Montoro, I searched on the Internet about how to become an oembed provider. Following are the links I found:
https://timnash.co.uk/becoming-oembed-provider/
http://freear.org.uk/content/5-steps-being-oembed-provider
You may want to use the CSS !important directive.
http://css-tricks.com/when-using-important-is-the-right-choice/
So I've been looking into this HTML 5 Microdata, but I'm not sure if or when it is appropriate to use. I know that if used with rating and you search a website it will pull up things like video rating and article ratings etc. But for Microdata like People or Places, is that so useful that I should start implementing it into all my websites - big and small? How big of an impact will this really have on my SEO if I start using Microdata on everything?
Maybe using something like http://schema.org/ as my standard term dictionary. I think that is what Google suggests using. Here's a link to the dev of microdata http://dev.w3.org/html5/md/ which will be helpful if you are unfamiliar with microdata
Following to that Schema.org - Why You're Behind if You're Not Using It... article on SEOMoz, I must say this question is not just about microdata and Google SERPs positions. I think it has to be taken in a much wider meaning:
Some advantages:
Implementing microdata on a website DOES increase CHANCE for Rich
Snippets displayed next to your site on Google search results. You can't say 'microdata = rich snippets', but you also can't say 'no microdata = no rich snippets' :)
Having rich snippets increases users' attention to that single search result and it CAN result in more clicks => visitors on your page.
Some cons:
Some rich snippets, which can be a result of using microdata, can let users find information they're looking for directly on the search results, without actually reaching your page. eg. if user is looking for a phone number and see it on rich snippet, he doesn't have to click and visit your page.
You have to decide on your own if you can take that risk. From my own experience (and that article comments as well), that risk is quite small and if you can, you should implement microdata. Of course, 'if you can' should really mean: 'if you can and it won't need the whole site to be rebuilt' :) If you have more serious things to do on your site, you should put them in front of a queue. Today, it's only 'nice-to-have', not 'must-have'.
And just for the end - I know my answer is not just yes or not the answer, but it's because the question is not that kind of question. However, I hope it could help you make your own decision.
My answer would be "Always."
It's the emerging standard for categorizing all forms of information on the web.
Raven Tools (no affiliation) has a schema.org microdata generator that's a good place to start:
http://schema-creator.org/product.php
They have a couple stock schema templates on that page (look on the left column).
I'm looking at things that can distinguish a blog from a normal website. These are things that a program needs to be able identify from the html of a website or particular features that a site supports. For eg. pings. The same for news websites.
I'm working on a blog/news monitor program and it will index sites to automatically determine if it is a blog or a news site and then monitor user feedback in comments etc on posts from sites that it determines to be of a blog or news nature.
So what i'm really after is suggestions on what i can use or look out for in identifying these sites.
It's going to be a desktop app written in java so if you have any code specifics in java that'll be great.
thanks in advance
You can search the page for the word "blog", as this will probably be present. Specifically, you can look for it in parts of the HTML page, or exclude parts - like links. This will give you a decent starting point.
Ultimately, though, this is something that will have to be done manually. You should construct an interface for people to specify if it's a blog or news site, or different features of it, when the site is submitted. Then you should create a database of sites and features, and flag them so that you or another administrator can review them and make changes. Once you do this for a site, you'll never need to do it again, so for example http://*.wordpress.com/ is all going to be blogs.
Some features you can automatically detect or get a pretty good chance of detecting, but ultimately you will need a manual review.
Look for a discoverable RSS or Atom feed, which should be present on a blog or serially-updated news site.
What is the benefit of using XFN (XHTML Friends Network)? I've seen this on multiple blogs and social networking sites but I don't really understand why it's useful. Other than being able to style these elements with CSS3 and select them with JavaScript, what's the benefit? Do you know of any sites out there that really utilize XFN to enhance the user experience? Also, are there similar alternatives to XFN?
Do you know of any sites out there
that really utilize XFN to enhance the
user experience?
Microformats aren't meaned to show extra information on the website itself, if it was, it could be used like John. You should think in another direction, for example, maybe browsers will support microformats one day.
Search engines may find this XFN-information interesting for one or another reason to see how the world is connected; I'm not sure what they actually could do with this information. You can read about that on Wikipedia
By the way, you can find out who your friends on the web are using Google's Social Graph API
Also, are there similar alternatives to XFN?
Take a look at microformat.org's wiki