Lately I have been hot on the Microformat trend, and have an opening to push hProduct into our product listing and product detail pages, which number in the 300,000+ pages. I believe it could serve as a great example of what the format COULD be, given the correct implementation.

I have posted out a couple times to [uF-new] around the progress we’re making with the new hProduct schema, and am also attempting to solicit feedback from the community. Much to my dismay, I have only received one response (albeit a positive one — thanks Hayes). It’s a bit discouraging to see multi-threaded emails around theoretical formats that in my opinion (I’m biased here) may not have as much of an impact as hProduct. Imagine the kinds of things one could do with an accepted hProduct standard — the partnership between retailers, manufacturers and the end consumer has implications that would heavily impact the e-commerce industry, potentially changing the way consumers find data and shop both online and in the store.

At the risk of bucking the process, my plan is to move ahead and provide real world examples (300,000+ examples!) of hProduct in production, let the jury decide whether this is a worthwhile pursuit, and iterate off of the findings.

Onward.

Ok, so maybe “the aftermath” is a bit dramatic. Currently sitting here the day after with very little to report issue-wise. The interesting thing to me when I think about it is with a flick of a switch early this morning, we just altered 300,000+ product pages. That number is impressive and scary all at the same time.

We have had our typical post-launch pain with a flurry of emails discussing performance and JS issues. I have come to expect this, especially if you consider how our site is pieced together with third-party content hacks, questionable iFrame solutions and numerous externally-referenced JS and CSS files. It’s a mess I’m hoping to tackle in our next release, which will be MAJOR.

Stay tuned.

3:00 am — where are you this morning? The war room, once filled with chatter among the three of us, has been silenced. “C” looked at me and asked, “Jay, are you getting tired?”, with a follow up, “you look tired.” I have slowed down considerably. I have filled the time continuing my work on push the hProduct microformat forward, as you can see on the hproduct brainstorming and hproduct proposal pages out on microformats.org.

Now pushing out JavaScript hack fixes to comply with our new front-end HTML. Official smoke testing will start at 3:30, 25 minutes from now.

It’s odd to come into the building usually filled with white noise and have it be totally quiet. Tonight two of my colleagues and I are sitting in “mission control”, tuned into our laptops looking for bugs, waiting for the big code rollover. It’s interesting to be here without the hustle and bustle usually associated with everyday business activity, but also refreshing that we can sit and have a conversation and watch TV on the big screen without interruption.

It’s 12:18am now… 3:30am for live smoke testing.

I was in one of my favorite computer stores the other day and I happened to catch a bit of a conversation between a salesperson and a customer regarding an extended service plan on a laptop. The man simply said, “at $750 dollars, I’ll use it for a year and throw it away.” I’d like to know where his garbage is.

This is the same person who’ll bitch about gas price being too high.