Metadata MOOC - Microformats

Still enjoying the Metadata MOOC, learning about microformats right now, including hCalendars which allow you to do this:

September 30, 2013– Gathering of people who have not watched Breaking Bad at To be confirmed

This is a made up event to test how an hCalendar works.

Categories: Breaking Bad, hCalendar, fake events

This hCalendar event brought to you by the hCalendar Creator.

I am ridiculously pleased with myself for understanding the code behind that! It looks like this:

<div class="vevent" id="hcalendar-Gathering-of-people-who-have-not-watched-Breaking-Bad"><time datetime="2013-09-30" class="dtstart">September 30, 2013</time>–<time datetime="2013-09-30" class="dtend"></time> <span class="summary">Gathering of people who have not watched Breaking Bad</span> at <span class="location">To be confirmed</span><div class="description">This is a made up event to test how an hCalendar works.</div><div>Categories: <span class="category">Breaking Bad</span>, <span class="category"> hCalendar</span>, <span class="category"> fake events</span></div>

<p style="font-size: smaller;">This <a href="http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar">hCalendar event</a> brought to you by the <a href="http://microformats.org/code/hcalendar/creator">hCalendar Creator</a>.</p></div>

The Next Quest: Metadata

'Metadata' is a scary word. I kind of know what it means (and can trot out the standard 'data about data' definition) but I don't properly understand it. So when I spotted that Coursera were offering a MOOC on Metadata I signed up.

Week 1 began yesterday and I am very surprised to say that it's great! Informative and enjoyable and the instructor (Jeffrey Pomerantz of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) has a great presenting style - so much so that I watched all the video lectures instead of shouting out random answers to University Challenge.

Knowledge of HTML is a prerequisite for the course but I'm glossing over that slightly - I can learn as I go along, right? And I was pleased to find that I scored well over 60% on the W3Schools’ HTML Quiz which is mostly down to tampering with the plain text view in LibGuides at work to see how things work (and possibly lucky guessing on a few questions).

If I get time I will take the free W3Schools’ HTML tutorial in parallel with the metadata MOOC. If not, I'll let you know how I get on!


(Image from Mel McC's Flickr photostream under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license)