Richard Wilkinson’s Blog

A GMail eureka moment

Today I had a eureka moment with GMail.  As with many other people I get loads of so joke emails with embedded pictures.  Sometimes I get ones which actually are quite funny so I want to forward them on, but up until today GMail would always turn the mail to plain text and remove the images.

Its not just with joke emails either, any email which has embedded images, fancy formatting would get stripped out.

Turns out the solution to this problem is to make GMail send html emails rather than plain text ones.  To do this click ‘Rich formatting’ link just below the subject line.

Thankfully GMail remembers your preference so you won’t need to do it every time.

Happy Emailing

Tags: gmail

Foo Fighters @ Wembley

On Friday I was lucky enough to go to see the Foo Figters at Wembley stadium and it was, quite frankly, amazing.

We were quite close to the stage at the start of the set, but had to leave as my brother needed the loo.  We then got back on to the pitch, but right at the back so I had to employ all of my getting to the front of a crowd at a concert skills to get anywhere near the front again.  The key points to remember for this are

1. Always follow bigger guys pushing through.  This technique alone can get you from the back to quite near the front.
2. Move into any space as soon as it appears.
3. Dont try pushing bigger meaner guys than you out the way, this can only end badly for you

Zoomf does microformats

Last week we released a slightly updated Zoomf.  One of the less visible updates was the support of the hListing microformat.  We also GeoTagged all of the search results and property details pages with both GeoURL and Geo Tag formats.

hListing is a relatively new microformat, but has recently been thrust into the limelight by its adoption on the price comparison site Kelkoo, which is owned by Yahoo.  You can read the original blog post announcing this here.  Fellow property site Nestoria quickly followed suit with hListing support on their results pages.  I should add that I didn’t copy Nestoria in adding hListing support, its just that we were working on other important updates to Zoomf and didn’t have time to do an update of the main website straight away :).

GeoTagging is also quite new and basically consists of embedding geographic location meta data into your web page so that the content of a page can be linked to a geographic location.  For Zoomf this means that on any results page (eg for clowne) the page is geotagged to the search location, and for any property detail page the page is geotagged to the location of that particular property.

You may ask whats the point of all this meta data and embedded microformats, especially when afaik Google doesn’t take account of this stuff when they index web pages, and it is invisible to a user using their browser.  The answer is that someday the big search engines may take notice of this content and use it to enhance their search results, Yahoo recently announced that their search results will start to extract more semantic meaning from pages using microformats, so the so called semantic web, of which microformats are a key part may be closer than you would think.

Until then smaller more specialised applications will be able to use this extra meta data to do cool things with the content on your pages, one example is the Optimus microformat translator which can transform pages with microformat data to JSON, XML or RSS formats, try it on a Zoomf results page or a linkedin public profile to see what I mean.

Tags: geotagging, hlisting, microformats, Zoomf