Place of Stuff

Being tech-savvy, smart and (statistically speaking) a good looking reader of this site, you will have no doubt heard of Open ID. Open ID was created to allow you to have just one ID which can beused on multiple websites meaning that you don’t need to remember lots of different user names and passwords. In the words of the site:

OpenID eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites, simplifying your online experience.

You get to choose the OpenID Provider that best meets your needs and most importantly that you trust. At the same time, your OpenID can stay with you, no matter which Provider you move to. And best of all, the OpenID technology is not proprietary and is completely free.

For businesses, this means a lower cost of password and account management, while drawing new web traffic. OpenID lowers user frustration by letting users have control of their login.

For geeks, OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. OpenID takes advantage of already existing internet technology (URI, HTTP, SSL, Diffie-Hellman) and realizes that people are already creating identities for themselves whether it be at their blog, photostream, profile page, etc. With OpenID you can easily transform one of these existing URIs into an account which can be used at sites which support OpenID logins.

OpenID is still in the adoption phase and is becoming more and more popular, as large organizations like AOL, Microsoft, Sun, Novell, etc. begin to accept and provide OpenIDs. Today it is estimated that there are over 160-million OpenID enabled URIs with nearly ten-thousand sites supporting OpenID logins.

Continue reading ‘Open ID’ »

I am a member of a few forums. All of these forums are well moderated and are free of the outside influences such as spam, warez and cracking. But why?

It could be argued that simply by joining a forum, the members (or community) would feel bound by the rules and spirit of that online forum to “be good”. After all, if they didn’t want to abide by the rules, they wouldn’t have joined, surely. Unfortunately, in these days of internet saturation, that is a somewhat naive notion - sorry.

All forums have rules and regulations, from simple one liners to fully thought out terms of conditions (along with sub-clauses and roman numerals). However, if the owners do not take steps to ensure these rules are followed and adhered to absolute chaos ensues and the people you want to be on the boards abandon you and your forum is unusable and empty of real members.
Continue reading ‘Methods of Spam Prevention on Forums’ »

I have been watching the debate over at WordPress Wank over the whole “is WP a bulky bloated blog tool or a fairly medium CMS tool?” question. Well, it sort of began as “whoopee a WP project is included in Google’s Summer of Code” but where nerds and geek abound…..

Anyway, that is pretty much by the by and not what I want to talk about. Read from this comment onwards. Ryan makes the throwaway comment that if that girl again is unhappy with the extra bloaty versions coming out, that it’s just as easy to revert back to version 1.5 or earlier. Yes, yes, you and I and that girl all know that that’s bollocks, particularly with the fact that WP normally updates to fix security holes. So yes, one could revert. But then you’d end up with security holes everywhere, themes not working, plugins not working and a generally crap experience for all. So that’s not a goer. But then it struck me: WP is a bunch of text files. So with this being GPL software surely there must be a method where we can be told that “a hole in version x.x.x can be fixed by changing line 4 from whatever to whatever in comments.php and so on or by installing version x.x.x+1“. That’s a naff way of putting it, but I find upgrading the whole system to be a real PITA. I would much rather just change the relevant lines by hand (or download just the required files) because that way my downtime is reduced, I know what needs to be backed up (or I can just comment out the current lines with an annotation to say “did this on x date because of y reason” and then add in the changed line from new. This means that my plugins don’t need to be switched off, I don’t need to reinstall everything and risk it all breaking. Again. And, more importantly with this being GPL software, I know what the changes are and can decide how to implement them.

Does this sound reasonable? I know there are people out there with far more PHP experience and knowledge (there can’t be people with less, surely) and people who know the inner workings of WP. So would this work or would it break something else. Would the lessened load on the WP servers be a good thing for people who have to download the whole thing because of inexperience or their own needs? Or am I just light headed from lack of sleep?