OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity.

Essentially once you have an OpenID identity you can use that account on any site that supports it. Your identity becomes a URL. I think it’s a great single-sign-on system for bloggers.

You can get an OpenID identity from lots of places. If you have a LiveJournal, TypeKey (Movable Type) or Zooomr account (just to name a few) you already have an OpenID identity. If not, there are lots of OpenID servers that you can create an account with. I recommend www.myopenid.com as it seems to be popular. If you are like me though, I wanted to use my own domain as my OpenID identity.

Using your own domain as an OpenID Identity

There are 2 ways that you can go about this. The first is to install an OpenID server on your domain. There is a list of options here. If you just want to support a single user you could check out phpMyID. I didn’t really want to run my own server so onto option 2.

This way is super easy. You can setup your domain to delegate to an actual OpenID server. This is even better if you want to change your main OpenID server without ever changing your OpenID URL. All you have to do is add some headers to your default page on your domain. Some instructions can be found here but the short version is add these to your HTML HEAD of your default page:

<link rel=”openid.server” href=”http://www.myopenid.com/server” />
<link rel=”openid.delegate” href=”http://yoururl.myopenid.com/” />

In my case I wanted to keep using my TypeKey server so I just added this:

<link rel=”openid.server” href=”https://www.typekey.com/t/openid” />
<link rel=”openid.delegate” href=”http://profile.typekey.com/jeffreyvanneste/” />

Now I can use http://jeffrey.vanneste.ca as my identity and switch freely between OpenID servers.  If you have a WordPress blog there is an OpenID delegate plugin you could check out.

WordPress Integration

I decided to see what was required in getting OpenID integrated into my blogs. Not surprisingly there was already a great WordPress OpenID plug-in that almost worked flawlessly for me. Installing and setting it up was super easy but the default install of PHP on dreamhost does not include the GMP functions. As luck would have it there is a great article written up on the dreamhost wiki on compiling a customized PHP.

Adding GMP support to PHP

I started with the “Alternative PHP 5 install Scripts” found here. Running the first script will download all the source required and extract it all into another folder. At this point you need to do the same for GMP. Login to your dreamhost shell and goto the folder where all the PHP5 libraries were extracted ($HOME/dist by default).

wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gmp/gmp-4.2.1.tar.gz
tar zxvf gmp-4.2.1.tar.gz
cd gmp-4.2.1
./configure –prefix=${HOME}/php5
nice -n 19 make
make install

Now we need to edit the second PHP5 install script. All you have to do here is find the PHPFEATURES variable and add this line somewhere between the quotes.

–with-gmp=${INSTALLDIR} \

Now run the second script which took quite awhile for me. Once it’s completed you have to add a .htaccess file to the root folder of your website with the following lines:

AddHandler phpFive .php
Action phpFive /cgi-bin/php.cgi

That should be it. If you have enabled the WordPress OpenID plugin you should now see an additional option to use an OpenID URL when making comments and logging in.

Getting started with OpenID development

If you want to get started on new projects that use OpenID there are already lots of awesome libraries available. The best site I found is http://www.openidenabled.com which has information on pretty much everything you would want to know about OpenID. There are also libraries written in Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP, .NET, Java and ColdFusion to help get your project jump started.

I also found for testing that it was useful having multiple OpenID identities. If you want to have some OpenID’s to test with check out http://www.jkg.in/openid/ which generates anonymous ID’s for you.

So now my blog supports OpenID registration. Why not do the same to yours so we don’t need yet another account?

How to create your own plugin

A great resource for creating your own plugin is Keyvan Nayyeri’s post where he writes a plugin to insert tags for Technorati. You will need the Live Writer SDK before you get started. The SDK includes a good help file and 2 examples for creating plugins. You can also check out some source code on some open source plugins.

Where can I get more plugins?

Some places I found that had quite a bit of content were http://wlwplugins.com/, Live Writer Plugins on Codeplex, and Microsoft’s gallery of plugins. I really like the Flickr4Writer plugin which makes it really easy to add in pictures from my flickr account.

Shared Items

On any item you can click the “share” link at the bottom of the item and it will add it to your shared items. What happens with your shared items? Well you share them of course. Clicking on “Shared Items” in the top left will display a page that shows all your shared items, the public page that they are available on, a RSS feed people can subscribe to, and javascript code you can add to your website to show your new shared items. Wow! My shared page is located here and you can subscribe to my shared item feed here.

Starred Items

Just like the shared items except these are just for you, private items. I like starring items in gmail and google groups so this works out well in feeds as well. By starring an item I can defer reading it until later.

Tags

I really wish bloglines would have added this a long time ago. Ever since I started using del.icio.us it makes so much sense to assign multiple tags to items. It worked out so well for bookmarks and it carries over very well to feeds as well. I haven’t come up with a perfect tagging mechanism yet so right not I’m very liberal with my tags. Google reader makes it very easy to manage all your tags and read items only tagged with specific names.

Keyboard Shortcuts

They nailed this one too. When I tried Rojo I was pretty excited to have tags for my feeds. I only tried rojo for a day before being appalled that it had no keyboard shortcuts (and it was always slow for me too). The google reader has an awesome set of keyboard shortcuts. Of course the ‘j’ and ‘k’ to select items (just click bloglines) and ‘v’ opens the item’s URL in a new window (I wish it was ‘o’ as I’m used to that with bloglines). They have navigation controls to jump around to home (’g’ then ‘h’), all items (’g’ then ‘a’), starred items (’g’ then ’s’), and two other ones that have some really cool javascript going on. If you press ‘g’ then ‘t’ a “popup” appears that shows all your tags, simply start typing and it filters the list and then press enter to open all the feeds for that tag. You can also open a specific feed this way by pressing ‘g’ then ‘u’. I’m very impressed!

Renaming Feeds

Why can’t I rename feeds in other services? No offense but I really hate when people have their blog named by some stupid tagline like “Technical excellence flows like a river”. Whenever I see a new item on one of these feeds I have no idea who or what it belongs to. I always wanted to name my feeds by who actually makes the posts. In my case I have “Jeffrey Vanneste’s Technical Blog”. A small feature added that made me very happy.

Other Stuff

They added a bunch of other features that are already done by lots of other readers so they aren’t really worth explaining (expanded and list views, mark all as read, unread counts, etc). There are already lots of posts popping up with positive notes about google’s new RSS reader (here, here, and here) but none from what I can see have mentioned the mobile version! You can access your feeds on your mobile device by going to the URL: http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/ . Bloglines has an great mobile version that works on my Pocket PC so I’m glad I will still be able to use my Pocket PC with Google Reader. If I had a decent cell phone I’d even be able to read my feeds on there.

Kudos to Google for releasing another top notch product. I’ll just pretend this is their first release of it.

I originally was going to move all my posts from my old blog over to this one but I don’t think there is any valuable content in them anymore. Anyways, I hope to start posting here soon. If you were subscribed to my old blog the RSS URL will not change.