Train of Thought

OpenID has been in the news lately. Having decided to get myself one, I discovered I already had ready access to two:

• Technorati
• Yahoo (I had to ask them to create it)

However, one of the points of OpenID is that no central servers are needed, and I could host my own. So I read Sam Ruby’s guide, which covered the essential details, and had a go. jh.mcaleely.com has three core components:

• An openid server (at /idservice) currently running phpMyID v0.7
• A Yadis/xrdf description of my local ID and the two others which are also me.
• A HTML page at the same location which is intended to help OpenID clients which don’t use xrdf to find my ID.

One key thing I discovered is that clients which use the HTML are quite sensitive about their parsing. plaxo.com, for example, would not parse a HTML4.01/Transisitional document, but was happy with the same document in XHTML 1.0. Given this sensitivity, I’m not hosting any actual human readable content at the URL - just a redirect to my homepage.What can I do with my OpenID? Join plaxo.com without a new password to remember for starters. I don’t think I would have bothered otherwise. I can also use it to log on to this wordpress blog. As I add blogs to mcaleely.com, I don’t have to add passwords.

A second small victory (They just keep coming!) today. This blog now supports OpenID for comments and other login chores. This is mostly a benefit to me (one less password to remember), but will form the basis for more features here on mcaleely.com over time.

 As a bonus for commenters, all OpenID vouched comments are automatically approved. I will revoke this (and moderate them once again), when spammers add OpenID to their arsenal.

 If you’re not sure if you have an OpenID, you probably do (or can get one) if you use AOL, Livejournal, Yahoo or Flickr… 

Note that an OpenID is optional for comments. 

Today I managed a trick I’ve long wanted. I’ve abolished www from all mcaleely.com URLs, without breaking the ‘pretty’ URLs I use for wordpress blogs. The trick was to have multiple .htaccess files, and actually spend some time understanding what mod_rewrite can do for me. There should be no public impact (other than you don’t need to type www. anymore on this site) - all the old www based URLs will redirect to their new homes.  Any breakage, let me know! 

I think it’s a lesson I should have learned already. Provide zero-cost access to a public space, and zero-cost commercial junk - spam - will dominate its content.So comments are now off by default on this blog. If you have something you want to say about a post, I can recommend you put it on your own blog. That’s what links are for. Feel free to email me to let me know to read your blog. I’ll probably open up discussion-worthy posts for comment from time to time as well.I’m tired of ‘moderating’ spam. It’s time in my life I no longer want to spend.

As you can see if you view the blog today, I’ve been editing the stylesheet. I’m trying to make it feel like part of an ‘integrated whole’ with the rest of mcaleely.com.Mind you, I’m aware that the website design I use is a bit dated, so maybe I should have a more radical redesign!

Well, I’ve been wanting a blog for a while. I’ve been following several for a number of years, and there is definitely a budding writer in me (my English teachers would probably be surprised!).I had a go at editthispage, and have been evaluating a few packages on mcaleely.com, on and off, for a couple of years. Wordpress 1.x, plog (now something else), and greymatter were all hosted here at one time or another.I’ve been looking for two features:

• Hosted at my own domain
• High quality URLs

I don’t like paying for URLs I can’t control. Either because they are hosted at someone else’s domain, or because some programmer somewhere thinks their time is more important than mine. URLs in the form of post.php?id=999 might have been a necessary step, but the very earliest web style guides recommended making URLs human readable, and I rather like that myself.Wordpress 2.0.1 seems to have finally satisfied these features, and its free!