Go2SA full of Microformat goodness
I’m a big fan of microformats and their potential. Its “early days” still as far as adoption of it goes, but when we developed Go2SA I thought, “Hey, you better practice what you preach…”. So I took a day and formatted some of the data.
Data that has been formatted so far:
The articles is formatted using the hAtom format.
The events is formatted using the hCalendar format.
The members’ listings is formatted using the hCard format.
The tags are all rel-tag formatted.
There is still lots of scope for improvement. We’d like to geo tag all our members. Maybe geo tag the photos in the photo gallery.
As soon as some of my most major projects are completed, I am going to attend to those!
Oh, btw, for the guys that have the Operator+ Firefox/Flock Plugin: If you go to Go2SA and you go into an event, you’ll be able to save it to your Google Calendar using the Operator+ plugin! Cool, eh?
technorati tags:go2sa.co.za, semanticweb, microformats, google, calendar, operator-plugin, firefox, flock
Blogged with Flock
Go2SA, Semantic Web Stii
Go2SA community driven tourism portal
Its been a loooong time coming and is finally here! Our latest project is in a final Alpha stage ready to go beta! And since everybody else launches at this time more or less, We though “Why the hell NOT?”. So here is one of the reasons for my lack of blogging…
Go2sa.co.za is a community driven tourism portal. By that I mean that content is generated by the members. The members is all tourism related service providers like accommodation establishments, activity providers, restaurants, etc… everyone that service the tourists.
One thing you have to remember is that most our clients are not necessarily as “internet confident” as you are. They are people that download emails and pay accounts using internet banking and that is as far as it goes. So in order to make the process of submitting content to the site a little less painful we’ve developed a Windows application in C# and dotNet for 1) creating content offline (a lot of these guys are still on dial-up) and 2) to resize photos before they hit the web site in order to save them time and confusion.
The main drive and reason for this portal was to give the actual tourism providers the opportunity and platform to promote not only themselves, but also the town and region they are in. They can also promote places of interest that do not have any commercial value. For example a lookout point or a mountain hike or trail. Anything that is of value for tourism, but not operated for profit. It is really up to the community. In return for advertising these non-commercial places of interest we give them free advertising in the form that their listing is displayed with every item they submit.
It is not a free model. We would have loved to do that, but there is a fair amount of training and support needed and because it is so different from normal listing sites, we absolutely HAD to go sell the idea and concept to the clients. So far everyonewe’ve approached (well, accept maybe one or two) in the Garden Route signed up.
However, if you have your own blog and should you wish to contribute to this awesome system, we’ve made it extremely easy! *Nic Haralambous* was so kind to allow us to aggregate the 10 latest feeds from SA Rocks! to our blogs page and the 5 latest to the front page! Thank you very much Nic! So to contribute is easy! Contribute to SA Rocks! and you would contribute to us in indirectly.
So go to the site and tell us what you think! And if you see bugs, even better! Let us know PLEAAAASE!!!
Visit: http://go2sa.co.za
Oh, and this is our mascot Gogo, the intergalactic tourist.
technorati tags:go2sa, tourism, marketing, southafrica, sarocks
Blogged with Flock
Go2SA, South Africa Stii
