Comments on: data standardization, microformats, not just all hype

By: shim

shim — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 15:22:20 +0000

Dude!!! are you coming this year on the ski trip?
we are planning on going to alberta canada… to ski banff, lake louise, and kicking horse… although we are hoping to focus on kicking horse primarily.
zev is already working on our accomodations, and erik is planning on coming with his girlfriend.
dates are feb. 4th to the 11th 2007
here’s to hoping you can make it!

By: dangerouslyawesome

dangerouslyawesome — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 01:53:06 +0000

the glaring problem i see with the openid project is a lack of coherant documentation.

for example, the task of installing OpenID for blog commenting on wordpress 2.0.

going to the openidenabled.com website and searching for “wordpress” i get 7 results, only 2 of which are really relevant to wordpress at all. and one of those is simply a link to the other. So that one relevant link, which is http://www.openidenabled.com/Members/http-3A-2F-2Fedulix.videntity.org-2F/openid-plugin-for-wordpress/openid-full-tar.bz2/view
is mostly a list of comments complaining about the lack of documentation! (the zip for the plugin contains NO readme. not good)

Ok, so onto google. A quick google of wordpress turns up some more useful links, which are more detailed than the directions on the openid site itself. Essentially, the “beta” plugin has dependencies as documented a few comments down on http://photomatt.net/2006/04/14/openid-for-wp/

overall, a pretty tedious process compared to how easy most other WP plugins are.

the openid site is effectively expansive, but difficult to navigate. this is a huge hinderance to the effectiveness of the mission of the project. how is it that something dedicated to make one process easy exists in a site that is possibly one of the most confusing i’ve ever experienced?

OpenID libraries exist for half a dozen major development platforms, including php , java, and .net. But with all of the other authentication schemes that are practically turn key, what incentive is there for a developer to impliment something that requires tons of digging just to get a mediocre set of documentation? The concept is gold. unfortunately, it’s a the bottom of a pretty rapid riverbed right now. I’m not sure how to even start panning for the value.

By: Chris Messina

Chris Messina — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 23:44:07 +0000

You could even start by OpenID enabling your blog...! ;)

So the real power is in hcard + openid + XFN.

Think on that for a spell.

By: dangerouslyawesome

dangerouslyawesome — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 23:32:11 +0000

theoretically, it wouldnt be impossible to use the openID open source code to tie together the services which offer an API that handles authentiction. even better, something that scales to ANY service that has an API for it's authentication scheme.

hmmm...time to get reading.

By: chris messina

chris messina — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 22:47:35 +0000

For single sign-on, check out OpenID (another technology I yammer on about)!