It has been some time since I was thinking that logging into all those blogs to leave a comment is lame. I guess this idea visits heads of many people out there. During the last couple of days I added few more blogs on my blogroll and started to think more about this problem.
My thinking was in the direction of some WordPress service. At least in the beginning. Something along the lines of Blogs Of The Day. Some services, say Blog Passport or something like that, that could be used by all those WordPress intallations to authenticate visitors. Basically, the even the same database table from WordPress could be used as a base. A person would login to at Blog Passport and than visit any WordPress installation and at any site that would support the scheme he would appear as logged in user.
But all I did was thinking. I didn’t even investigate if there are any existing solutions. The good thing is that I didn’t write any code. Because today I stumbled upon something that would be acceptable – OpenID. I first saw it at LiveJournal.com. It already supports it.
The idea of an OpenID is simple. It is even simplier that what I was thinking. It is a distributed system that authenticates against a URL. You can be logged in at any website that supports OpenID and than any other site that supports OpenID would work for you . The description of the process, the protocol, and the development status are all at the project’s website.
The good things about OpenID so far are:
- free and open and intends to stay this way.
- decentralized
- supported by some big sites (LiveJournal.com)
WordPress plugin is in the works. I hope that this project will get some attention and that we will finally have one annoying problem solved. Cheers!
I’m looking forward to a WordPress OpenID plugin. Did you mean to say that you are making one??
I am looking forward to it myself. OpenID website mentions that the plugin is in the works. I don’t know who is developing it, but it’s surely not me…