Hello, and welcome to our first, and probably last, “Microdata Monday.”
Micro what? Microdata. According to wikipedia:
Microdata is a WHATWG HTML specification used to nest metadata within existing content on web pages. Search engines, web crawlers, and browsers can extract and process Microdata from a web page and use it to provide a richer browsing experience for users. Search engines benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data because it allows search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide more relevant results to users.
Umm.. meta what? And more importantly, what is any of this crap doing on a food blog?
Well, ok, in as non-technical terms as this hard core geek can muster: For our purposes, microdata tells sites like google and pinterest that a recipe is, indeed a recipe, and what the various parts of that recipe are (e.g. ingredients, nutritional info, etc). It does other things too, but it is only this function with which we will concern ourselves here.
The thing is, adding microdata to recipes is, to say the least, a big pain in the ass. And as a consequence, few food bloggers use it. We weren’t even using it until very recently.
So I did what any good geek would do under these circumstances: I built a tool to automate formatting recipes with microdata. And, like any good geek, I’ve made it available for all to use here.
It looks like this:
If you’re not a food blogger, it probably won’t be much use to you. But if you are, I strongly recommend you give it a try. And of course, any and all feedback is greatly appreciated.
Ironically, we can’t use it for recipes on our site yet for bizarre technical reasons which we hope to have ironed out in a few days. But we hope that this tool will increase adoption of microdata for recipes, which is good for the foodie community and indeed the internet as a whole.
Bon Appetit!
