hCalendar Microformats and TripIt

As many of you have commented, it’s super that travelers can build and share their travel plans via the www.tripit.com website, but there is also a need to re-publish this information in other formats so that your travel information is available in the applications you like to use.  We took another step in this direction over the weekend by adding hCalendar microformat markup to all of the TripIt itinerary pages.

hCalendar microformat is a small chunk of HTML code that we put on the itinerary page so that a microformat-enabled browser can automatically extract information (e.g., calendar events, a geographic location, or a person's contact information) right off the page and use that information with other applications on your computer (e.g., your calendar application).

With hCalendar microformat on every TripIt itinerary, you just need a microformat-enabled reader and you can automatically copy your TripIt itinerary to your desktop calendar and then sync that information to your mobile device or another application.

While most of you probably don't yet have a microformat reader on your desktop, they are freely available for most operating systems and for most web browsers (unfortunately, not Internet Explorer yet). See here for more information on microformats and where to find a microformat reader.

This can be a useful work-around for those of you that use a personal calendar (e.g., Outlook 2003) that doesn’t support the iCalendar standard.  Microformats won’t continually sync your latest itinerary to your calendar, but at least you can get your trip data into your calendar or mobile device.

Here's an example of what this process looks like while using Firefox on Windows with the Operator microformat-reader plug-in and Outlook 2003.  The first screen shows me selecting my flight from San Francisco to Chicago.  The second screen shows me about to save that flight into my Outlook calendar.  So simple!

Please post any comments or questions or contact us at support@tripit.com.

-- Andy

Comments

[Sean McMains]

Hey, good for you guys! It's nice to see microformats gaining wider support across the Internet. Well done!

[Tim Brown]

Hey, cool. I'm curious about how hCalendar works for an implementation like this....

Did you implement hCalendar on both individual itineraries and the master itinerary?

If someone acts on that hCalendar implementation by "adding to desktop calendar" when they're on an individual itinerary, then they go to the master and "add to desktop calendar" ... is there a double of the trip they added individually?

And, if they add the master itinerary to their desktop calendar, then a week later add a trip in Tripit, does their desktop calendar refresh?

[Andy Denmark]

hCalendar is specialized HTML markup that we've embedded in each itinerary page as well as on the main 'My Trips' page. The hCalendar markup is read in and understood by a microformat reader such as Operator. The microformat reader then enables you to do special things such as copy a flight or hotel check-in into your desktop calendar.

Unfortunately, while we update the hCalendar markup every time you change a flight time or the length of your trip, none of the microformat readers I know of use those updates to keep your desktop calendar in sync.

To find out more about calendar integration you might want to also check out Scott's post on the subject here: http://blog.tripit.com/2008/02/one-of-the-feat.html

I hope that answers your question. Thanks for using TripIt!

[John Smith]

cool stuff!!!

[John Smith]

cool stuff!!!

[John Smith]

cool stuff!!!