Tag Archives: openID

OpenID & You & Me

Ugh. Title-suckage. Sorry. Can I blame it on a chaotic week?

So Blogger have made that switch to OpenID support that I was talking about. For any of those of you on WordPress.com or Typepad (or LiveJournal or AOL/AIM) you can now use your identity from those platforms.

Alternatively, if you have a self-hosted blog, Simon Willison has easy to follow instructions to get yourself an OpenID which points at your own domain. So now, any comments I make on Blogger blogs will point back to my blog once more. Happy happy joy joy.

(Still can’t see the point of the ‘Nickname’, by the way. Since, essentially, it’s the same as Anonymous, why not get rid of the ‘Anon’ field. Surely commenters can just type ‘Anon’ in the space for a ‘Nickname’ if they don’t want to leave any identifying information?)

Edit: Oh *now* the official Blogger blog is talking. This exerpt particularly amuses me: “Ironically, our testing of OpenID, a feature that lets you use accounts from all over the web to comment on Blogger, made it appear that we were trying to force you into getting a Google Account. We regret this appearance, since we’re strong supporters of OpenID and open web standards in general.” Hmmmm.

Bl*gger Behaving Badly

Okay, so I wrote a little rant about how Bl*gger is ticking me off, what with its changes stopping (non-Bl*gger) bloggers from linking our URL to our comments (not 100% true – hyperlinks can still be included in the body of the comment, it does get a little tiresome typing/cut-n-pasting the html in though).

However. I’ve done a little digging and it seems this might just be a part of the Bl*gger shift to supporting OpenID. Which is, apparently, A Good Thing. I just wonder why Google/Bl*gger made this annoying little change over to the next-to-useless ‘Nickname’ field instead of leaving us with the option of including our (non-Bl*gger) URL in the ‘Other’ section. Really. They’re just pissing people off. The assumption many bloggers seem to be making at the moment is that Google/Bl*gger are trying to coerce everyone into having an account with them (which is possibly also true, I grant you).

I have found many a new and interesting blog through following links in the comment section of other blogs. I’ve been ‘found’ by other readers in the same way. This latest development is just plain irritating, and (cue my very best Pauline Hanson voice)… I don’t like it!

Must go and check out OpenID some more though. Sounds useful.

Then I have to go finish beating Dermot at Scrabble (a rare occurrence) and sew together eleventy-million pre-schoolers’ Christmas stockings. There will be glitter all over this place for months!

Edit: Here’s some of the discussion re. Bl*gger and OpenID, at http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites, http://www.notsorelevant.com, http://mashable.com and http://googlesystem.blogspot.com