You may have noticed some new features on spraci. Blogs are now themeable (you can change the look of your blog easily - go to "blog design" to change your blog settings). New admin page There is a new "Dashboard" page to help you manage your own content on spraci which shows your most recent blog posts, events and forum posts with links to all the forms where you can post and edit your content. User Groups have been added. You can now create a group which other people can join with its own forum and a combined blog of all group members' blogs. (with rss feed)

If you are the moderator of a group (you are the moderator of any group you create), you can set the forum to be "open" (anyone can view it, users who are logged in can post, like on the other forums)

or "closed" (only people who have joined your group can view its forum or post to it)

Look for the "Groups" link in the forums section or go to http://www.spraci.com/groups to sta

You will soon have some new methods for adding your events to listings sites like spraci.com thanks to the use of

microformats /

I've had a look at the wordpress plugin.

I think I could set it up so that when an event is posted to a blog via this plugin it is recognised as an event and posted to the event listings under the correct date, categories, city, etc.

In simple terms:

The use of microformats like hcalendar could provide lots of interesting ways for people to syndicate data such as event details, locations, contact details, etc to to other sites using standard blogging software while still keeping the data in seperate machine-useable fields.

A handy microformats toolkit from Microsoft(!) making it easier for developers to write, style and find microformats (hCard and hCalendar in particular). Neat! Saved By: Microformats | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: oomph, microformats, toolkit, microsoft, developer, hcard, hcalendar

A good, detailed hands-on article about implementing hCalendar. Saved By: Microformats | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: microformats, hcalendar, markup, semantics, events

As with the debate over a year ago, the concerns raised are not about microformats as a whole being inaccessible. Theyre not even strictly about the hCalendar microformat itself. The concerns are purely centred around the (mis)use of the ABBR design pattern. Saved By: Microformats | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: microformats, web authoring, accessibility