A few weeks earlier I was watching a re-run of the 1980 remake of Flash Gordon. You know the one, with Brian Blessed and his Gordon's aliiive? catchphrase. Later that week, as I sat bored and numb-bummed during a school parents' evening I wondered idly if the activatethedeathray.com domain was still available. It was and five minutes later, thanks to Media Temple and my iPhone, it was mine, all miiine.

What better way to help explain the ins-and-outs of Microformats in half a day than a little tongue-in-cheek, Flash Gordon inspired sci-fiery? Flash, Emperor Ming and Dale Arden helped to explain the current, most widely implemented Microformats including hCard, hCalendar, hReview and hAtom within the framework of a new Flash Gordon inspired micro-site. I know that one of the main principles of Microformats is that they deal exclusively with non-fictional data, but this didn't seem to matter to the audience who, according to the feedback from Carsonified, enjoyed the workshop enormously.

Download the example files and workshop slides

My example files from the Activate The Death Ray Microformats workshop now have a new home. If you leave me your name and email address you can also download the slides from the event, either as a set of images for your iPhone or iPod Touch or as a Quicktime movie.