John Allsopp, of the seriously good Microformatique site, has just released a book called “Microformats – empowering your markup for Web 2.0″. John has been writing on microformats for quite a while now and it is great to see this book emerge. You can get it on amazon.com or .co.uk

In this book, noted web developer and long time WaSP member John Allsop teaches all you need to know about the technology: what Microformats are currently available and how to use them; the general principles of how they work, so you’ll be able to understand and use future Microformat; how to use Microformats with web sites and software that already support them; and how to create your own. The focus is kept on practical examples as much as possible throughout.

We’ve just started rolling out invites to current beta testers to point their LouderVoice accounts at their own blogs instead of our reviewblogs. There are still one or two small glitches to iron out but overall things are very solid. The braver testers can go ahead and try to figure it out for themselves! Otherwise we’ll be sending out the instructions in the coming days.

A big thanks to our Swedish guru for managing to get us working with the new Blogger platform using the old API!

We should be enabling external blog publishing on LouderVoice this week. Just to give you some sense of how things look in the wild, here are some of the test blogs we are using. We should be adding Blogger to the list this afternoon:

• WordPress MU: LouderVoice Review Blogs
• WordPress.org: Bandon Blog
• WordPress.com: d’Other Blog
• Movable Type: I love it, I love it not
• TypePad: Conor’s Very Typetastic Pad
• LiveJournal: The Live Arguer

I’ve blogged many times in the past about what a wonderful set of products VMWare have and not just because EMC used to be a customer of Argolon way back. In the last year we have been avid users of VMWare Server. However it has recently been annoying the hell out of us as it required hacking around to get it running on Fedora Core 6. Bizzarely I could run FC6 inside VMWare on XP but could not get VMWare running on FC6 so I could run FC6 in it!

I’ve proposed having an OpenCoffee Club meeting next week in Cork City. Read the details over at Argolon.

We hit a hard-to-reproduce bug yesterday on the main site and we’re trying to get to the bottom of it. One thing we’ve done is turn on debug messages so if anything goes wrong you may find yourself facing a screen full of red text. If you do, it’d be a huge help if  you could copy n paste it into a mail and send to beta1 at loudervoice dot com.  In fact if you spot any anomalies at all, please let us know so we can improve the stability for everyone.

The most important feature of LouderVoice (in fact its whole point) is the ability to publish structured reviews to your blog and for us to collect them too. This has not been enabled during Beta test yet and I know many of you are dying to test it out. I hope we can turn it on very very soon and this is just to let you know where we are both in development and testing.

I’ve made good use of Meebo in the past working for silly places that block external IM but I’ve avoided putting the MeeboMe widget on our blogs for one simple reason; I’d have to have to be logged into Meebo in a browser window to get the messages rather than receiving them in my IM client where they belong.

Well it looks like I was totally wrong and you can configure Gaim or any other Jabber client to receive the messages from those who try to contact you on your blog via the MeeboMe widget. In Gaim you just add a new account where type=jabber, user=your_meebo_login, server=meebo.org and password=your_meebo password.

We deployed Beta2 of the site last Monday but a few problems have held us up. Most of the big clangers are now fixed  and I’m going to start issuing more invites today. Even if you are not a Beta Tester, head on over to loudervoice.com to check out the very slick new look.

In terms of functinality, the main focus was on usability and stability. There are not many visible new features there compared to Beta1. The most visible changes are that all actions on results are “in-situ” rather than sending you off to different pages.

Only a couple of days late, we deployed Beta2 to www.loudervoice.com (moving from beta.loudervoice.com). There are a few teething problems in there but the overall behaviour and look of the site is far far superior to Beta1.

I’ll be back from FoWA tomorrow and will start sending out lots more Beta Test invites.

I’d like to encourage all current beta testers to log on and give us their feedback on the changes and tell us what you’d really like to see for the Full Launch.