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A note about simple registration
Simple registration is an extension that allows OpenID consumers to ask your provider for extra information—your name, e-mail address, date of birth and so on.
[... 391 words]Doing Local Right
“Doing Local Right” was the title of my talk at this year’s @media Europe. Patrick had asked me if I could put together a case study, and I jumped at the chance to share some of the work of my former colleagues at the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas. I had the privilege of working at the newspaper for a year in late 2003-2004.
[... 735 words]Help me figure out my Macbook Pro!
For (slightly) better diagnostics of your wireless connection problems, try running the “Console” application (use Quicksilver or Spotlight to find it). That will show your the system log which often includes more information about connection errors.
[... 50 words]Massive Dreamhost hack, WordPress not to blame
On mezzoblue, Dave Shea reports that someone had modified every index.php and index.html file on his site to include spam links at the bottom of the page, hidden inside a <u style="display: none;">. Dozens of other people in his comments reported the same thing happening to their sites.
Problems with XHTML content type.
The first question you should be asking is why you need XHTML—if you don’t have a specific reason (the need for XML parsers to be able to consume your pages) you’re much better off with HTML 4.01 for now, and HTML 5 in probably a year or so.
[... 245 words]oxfordgeeks.net
Nat and I had a bit of a mini-hackday this bank holiday Monday. Nat’s been doing a great job summoning local geeks out of the woodwork with Oxford Geek Nights event, but it’s still pretty hard to find other interesting events in the Oxfordshire area. It’s not that there aren’t any, it’s just that the geek community in Oxford is currently pretty fragmented.
[... 295 words]The Implications of OpenID
My second presentation at XTech 2007. Unfortunately there’s just the Matt Webb keynote to go, and I spent most of the conference worrying about my talks. There’s a lot to be said for speaking as early as possible.
[... 86 words]JavaScript Libraries: The Big Picture
I just gave my first talk at XTech 2007 (I’m speaking again on Friday, on OpenID). Slides are on slideshare.net.
[... 40 words]Turn your Django application in to an OpenID consumer
I’ve just put the finishing touches on the first releasable version of django_openidconsumer, a package that makes it easy to add OpenID consumer support to any Django application.
[... 229 words]Extending a WiFi network with two Macs and a FireWire cable
Last night’s Oxford Geek Night went really well, despite more than the usual flurry of problems. It’s definitely true that the more geeks there are in a room the less likely it is that the projector will work! Thankfully we got everything up and running in time for the talks to start, although it was a pretty close call.
[... 595 words]San Diego, tell me more
You should totally go to Horton Plaza. It’s a shopping mall, but it’s also basically one big architectural joke. Everything is at funny angles, and stairs and ramps never take you where they think you will. I usually have no interest in visiting malls at all but I totally loved it.
[... 64 words]Stupid computers.....do what I want!
Look for a header called X-Forwarded-For, but be sure to read this first.
[... 26 words]Oxford Geek Night 2
If you missed the last Oxford Geek Night, you really owe it to yourself to make it to the next one. If you were there then you shouldn’t need any convincing.
[... 180 words]My Future of Web Apps talk as a slidecast
The team at Carson Systems have a pretty quick turnaround on their podcasts; they’ve had full recordings of every speaker up for a few days now. I spent a bunch of time over the weekend splicing the recording of my talk together with my slides, and the result is now available at The Future of OpenID (a slidecast).
[... 177 words]Six cool things you can build with OpenID
I’ve posted the slides from my Future of Web Apps talk on OpenID, minus the demo videos. I’m planning to put together a video that combines the slides, demos and audio once the official podcasts have been published.
[... 816 words]Warning, this is a bad site!
Unfortunately it’s not a glitch in the matrix—this happened to a friend of mine. If a site gets this warning and isn’t listed on StopBadWare.org it just means that Google have blacklisted it themselves—they don’t share their reasons with StopBadWare, and provide no mechanism to find out why they’ve blacklisted you. The link to StopBadWare is something of a red herring.
[... 135 words]OpenID at the Future of Web Apps
People seemed to really like my talk—they even laughed in the right places! I’ll be posting full notes, slides and writing an article for Vitamin over the next few days. For the moment I’m just enjoying coming down from the adrenaline high.
Speaking at the Future of Web Apps
Just a quick update to say that I’ll be speaking at the Future of Web Apps conference in London on February the 21st, talking about OpenID. I really enjoyed last year’s event and feel honored to be included in such an exciting schedule.
[... 86 words]Why you should be using disambiguated URLs
Good URLs are important. The best URLs are readable, reliable and hackable.
[... 553 words]idproxy.net: Use your Yahoo! account as an OpenID
In an ideal world, some or all of the sites with large user databases (Yahoo!, AOL, Google, Amazon and so on) would act as OpenID providers, allowing their users to sign in to OpenID supporting sites around the Web. Until that happens, people who want to use OpenID need to sign up for Yet Another Account to do so.
[... 414 words]Social whitelisting with OpenID
A key feature of OpenID is that it provides a globally unique identifier for every user, no matter what site or service they are using on the Web.
[... 502 words]Solving the OpenID phishing problem
Most of the arguments I hear against OpenID are based on mis-understandings of the specification, but there is one that can’t be ignored: OpenID is extremely vulnerable to phishing.
[... 531 words]How can my non-tech-savvy Mum maintain her own website?
Here’s a trick I’ve used in the past. Find a simple wiki package (I used Tavi). Install it, twice. Point both installations at the same backend database. Now password protect one of them with .htaccess—that’s the one that gets used to edit her site. Make some simple template modifications to the other one to make it not look like a wiki—remove the edit links (and delete the edit saving code for good measure), configure it to display WikiLinks with spaces in the middle, then add the site’s navigation around the top. This wiki will be the public site.
[... 216 words]Leaving Yahoo!, going freelance
Last Friday was my last day at Yahoo!. I’ve had a fantastic time there, and will really miss working with Tom, Paul and the many other superb Yahoos I’ve had the privilege to meet.
[... 209 words]An OpenID is not an account!
I’m excited to see that OpenID has finally started to gain serious traction outside of the Identity community. Understandably, misconceptions about OpenID continue to crop-up. The one I want to address in this entry is the idea that an OpenID can be used as a replacement for a regular user account.
[... 601 words]More home improvements
I’ve had an offline Christmas, not entirely through choice (broadband at my Dad’s new place in rural France isn’t working yet) but welcome. I did have my laptop with me, and I’m using Bazaar for version control so being offline isn’t a barrier to checking in code. I’ve just rolled out a bunch of new features that I put together over the past few days.
[... 514 words]How is Google giving me access to this page?
Google have an open URL redirector, so you can craft a link that uses that:
[... 35 words]Sending a postal letter via the internets?
Thanks mycapaciousbottega. It looks like there’s still a business opportunity here because emailbypost.com doesn’t work! I got through the create-your-letter step, but when I hit the “pay” button I got an error from the payment service stating that their user account didn’t exist.
[... 67 words]What is the physically smallest and cheapest laptop capable of running OS X?
Apple rumors are worth approximately nothing, but there’s one going around that a ultra-slim 12“ MacBook Pro is going to be announced at MacWorld Expo some time in the second week of January; might be worth holding on until then to see if there’s any truth to it. There’s certainly a 12” sized hole in the line-up at the moment.
[... 81 words]OpenID screencast
OpenID’s biggest problem is its learning curve. Using it as actually really simple, but if you’re not technical the amount of stuff you have to know before you can understand it is enormous. If you are technical, it just doesn’t seem like it should work—there are a bunch of questions that come up every time OpenID is discussed anywhere (“but surely there’s nothing to stop someone else from spoofing your ID”) which OpenID has answers for, but which are easily misunderstood.
[... 383 words]