Playing with authentication systems…

Posted by on January 5, 2007

I’ve added an OpenID authentication system to my blog. Mostly this is so that hopefully friends of mine who read the blog that are on LJ will have an easier time being able to post comments since they should just be able to use their LJ ID to authenticate to do the comments.

Please let me know if this is working or not working as I’m pretty interested in seeing this sort of system becoming more common and adoption among the fringe can sometimes be a good proving ground for the core.

Update: I’ve switched over to the default template in order to allow the OpenID system show up in the comments. I had been thinking of doing a major theme change anyway now I just have to find one that supports what I want in it, or hack one together myself (which seems much less likely).

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15 Comments.

  1. corwin January 5, 2007 at 6:14 pm
    Huh! Perhaps I’ll try it out. If its turned on, it doesn’t look like it from here in the comments box.
  2. Cavorter January 5, 2007 at 6:17 pm
    Precisely the sort of feedback that I was looking for. It _was_ there the last time I checked, but I’ll have to see what happened.

    In the meantime, there is an OpenID login near the bottom of the right column (Should be the first item in the “Meta” section).

  3. lcohen January 5, 2007 at 6:20 pm
    doesn’t look like it’s there….

    nope, didn’t work

  4. Cavorter January 5, 2007 at 6:25 pm
    Well, it appears that it is the theme that is getting in the way. Oddly even after I removed the theme version of the comments.php file it didn’t help. Should be there now though.
  5. http://talkswithwind.livejournal.com/ January 6, 2007 at 12:20 am
    Hmmm. A bit clunky, but I could get used to this.
  6. Cavorter January 6, 2007 at 9:35 am
    Yeah, it’s not the most elegant system yet unfortunately. OTOH – what I do really like about it is that it provides an easy back trail from one system to the next for who a person is, as long as they want to use it. I think I finally got things setup properly on my end yesterday so I should be able to post comments on LJ the other direction.
  7. http://talkswithwind.livejournal.com/ January 6, 2007 at 11:45 am
    Oo, good point, that. I’ll have to go take a look about getting OpenID stuff into my friends-list.
  8. http://talkswithwind.livejournal.com/ January 6, 2007 at 12:03 pm
    http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=232

    Looks like once you post a comment somewhere in LJ-land, we can add you to our friends list off of that comment.

  9. Cavorter January 6, 2007 at 2:23 pm
    The downside however is that I still have to use the LJ system in order to view the friends locked stuff, which is a problem. I checked to see if it was possible to get a feed of just the friends stuff, but unfortunately it appears I have to have a paying account for that to be a possibility.
  10. http://talkswithwind.livejournal.com/ January 7, 2007 at 1:26 am
    Perhaps… if you’re using a browser-based aggregator, the authentication will carry though to the aggregation process and you’ll get the friends-locked entries of the folk you subscribe to. IMHO, all the ‘friends list’ is, is a glorified RSS feed to all the visible posts of the people I list as friends. If you’re not using a browser-based aggregator, though (bloglines) that probably won’t work.
  11. http://talkswithwind.livejournal.com/ January 7, 2007 at 2:20 pm
    Hmmm. If you use a browser-based RSS system, once your authenticated into LJ by wayof OpenID, you can pull down individual user’s lists. IMHO, all a ‘friends list’ is, is an RSS feed of all the visible posts of the people you call ‘friends’. Though, if you’re using an aggregator other than browser-based (bloglines, etc) that probably won’t work for you.
  12. corwin January 7, 2007 at 2:22 pm
    hmmm… interesting things. Logged in by OpenID I can see my entries I posted. In as anonymous, all I see no OpenID posts.
  13. Cavorter January 7, 2007 at 4:33 pm
    Your other comments appear to have suddenly gotten eaten my spam filter (Spam Karma 2) for some bizarre reason. I’ll be watching that and tweaking some settings. I think it may be thinking the comments are spam because the author name is a hyperlink.

    I don’t think that browser based vs non-browser based has really anything to do with whether I can read friends locked posts. I’m already reading the RSS feeds for several people’s LJs but even after someone added my OpenID to their friends list their friends locked posts still don’t show up there. The how-to article I linked to states explicitly that the only way to get those posts via RSS is to 1) pay for a membership (not going to happen) and then 2) apply a style to the friends page and hope I have a compatible aggregator.

    The end result answer being: not useful to me.

  14. laffingbuddha January 25, 2007 at 3:03 pm
    I left a comment on LJ, not listed here though.
  15. Cavorter January 25, 2007 at 3:08 pm
    Yeah, but that’s nothing new. Comments on items picked up by the LJ feed have never come back here, and since that feed is (at least AFAIK) not in any way connected with the OpenID login I have over there and also AFAIK not possible to link up, I doubt it will ever happen.