Our CSS is now in .spriter files, and using a sprite is as easy as a normal CSS background image:

span.icon {
  -spriter-background: 'icon.png';
}

There’s a Rack middleware that converts .spriter files to CSS and generates the sprite images on request which we use in development, and a few simple methods to create static assets that we use when deploying to production.

If you’re interested you can read more on the Reevoo blog and get the code from GitHub.

You can include it in your Rails app by adding this line to your test environment config file (config/environments/test.rb):

config.gem "georgebrock-assert-microformats", :source => "http://gems.github.com/", :lib => false

Now you can test your microformats using some shiny new assertions.

By default these assertions will look for microformats in Rails’ @response:

test "show view should contain an hcard" do
  get :show
  assert_mf_hcard
end

You can also test the values of microformat attributes:

assert_mf_hcard :fn => 'George Brocklehurst', :url => 'http://georgebrock.com/'

And you can pass in some HTML, which comes in handy when you’re testing view helpers or not using Rails at all:

assert_mf_hcalendar my_html, :summary => 'Birthday party'

The microformat parsing is done using Mofo, so assert-microformats supports all the microformats that Mofo supports.

If you’re interested in how it works, or you want to make any changes, the code is all on GitHub.

I’d also like to thank Tom Lea for looking over the code and making some improvements.

Screenshot of XFN profile discovery

Yahoo hosted another of their Open Hack events in London this weekend. I took the opportunity to play around with YQL, the Google Social Graph API and the XFN microformat and built a Greasemonkey script that recognises when you’re on a social network profile and finds other social network profiles belonging to the same person.

If you want to try it out, just follow these simple steps:

1. Get Firefox and Greasemonkey.
2. Visit this page to install the plugin: georgebrock.com/openhack2009/xfndiscovery.user.js
3. Go to a profile page (like a Twitter page, or even this blog) and you’ll see a “more user profiles” link in the rop right corner of the page

If you’re more interested in how it works, you can find the source code on GitHub.

It starts by looking for links that use rel="me" (XFN’s way of saying “this link points to another page about the same person as this page”). If it find any it uses YQL (and a clever bit of XPath magic from Brian Suda) to find more rel="me" links on those page and so on until it runs out of profile links. To make sure nothing’s been missed it’ll bundle together all of the URLs that it’s found and pass them to the Google Social Graph API. If the SG API finds any new unique URLs they are parsed with YQL too. The combination of YQL and the SG API means that the script gets good coverage for most people, whether or not they have deliberately made use of rel="me".

One fun thing about building this hack was finding my own profiles on sites that I’d forgotten about (it turns out I have a soup.io account).

So here it is, Lastify in all its glory:

Lastify adds a drawer to the bottom of the Spotify window

Update: Lastify now supports tagging and has a much prettier user interface.

If you want to try Lastify you’ll need to install SIMBL first and everything else you need is hosted over on GitHub.

It’s a quick-and-dirty hack, and so all the usual caveats apply.

I spent the day playing around with SIMBL, Spotify and, of course, the Last.fm API trying to build a Spotify Scrobbler.  Progress was slower than I would have liked and I spent most of the day trying to figure out Spotify’s internal APIs and following various dead-ends (reverse engineering compiled software is tricky), but it was good to learn how to write SIMBL bundles and by the end of the day I’d managed to hack together a working plugin that was aware of when a new track started and what the track and artist names were. It seemed a shame to leave it half done, so I spent some time when I got home adding scrobbling capabilities, and you can now find a working Spotify Scrobbler over on GitHub (if you want to use it you’ll find instructions in the read-me file).  It’s not particularly polished, but I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. All in all, a good first Hack Day.

Update: As of 18th December 2008 Spotify has built-in scrobbling support.

A script that automatically transforms links to Technorati’s events service into a useful little menu allowing events to be downloaded or added to various online calendar services. If you want to see it action check out this live demo.

It’s a bit rough around the edges (there’s a list of issues below). It uses Dan Webb’s Sumo microformats parser to extract event details (some online calendar services don’t support iCalendar import, so the details need to be passed directly) and JQuery to manipulate the page.

Files

The latest version of the script is kept in a public repository on GitHub

How to use

1. Mark up your events using hCalendar
2. Add a link to Technorati’s events parsing service. For example, the link for this page would be http://technorati.com/events/http://blog.georgebrock.com/projects/enhanced-hcalendar-downloads
3. Add all the relevant Javascript files to your page (Sumo’s microformat.js and hcalendar.js, JQuery and enhanced-hcalendar-downloads.js)
4. That’s all you need to do, but you might want to add some CSS rules to make the menu prettier (start here: enhanced-hcalendar-downloads.css)