Goritaboon Sunsang Talk @ UWGB CS

It’s been a really long while since my last post. The academic year 2008-2009 is over, so I may be able to write more.

In this post, I’d like to address the issue of authentication for my blog and the related technologies. So far, anyone could leave comments without registration and login, so I’ve been receiving very many spam comments. To rectify this, I changed the blog setting so that only registered and logged on users can leave comments.

This leads to another interesting problem: I don’t want any commenter to wait for my approval for registration. So I wanted to give it a try to allow OpenID authentication. In a previous post, I mentioned that readers can leave comments with their Facebook ID. OpenID is similar but it’s simply more open than Facebook Connect. You might already have an OpenID, like Yahoo, AOL, or Google. The not-so-great part is that the ID is rather complicated URL based. For example, my AOL OpenID is http://openid.aol.com/hosungs. OpenID allows visitors to authenticate themselves without separate/additional registration, but it seems their choice of identifiers is not very good.

Anyway, I wanted to allow both OpenID and Facebook Connect authentication methods, but it seems like the two plugins don’t coexist very well. For example, when I activate OpenID plugin, the Facebook Connect button no longer shows up. I searched a little further and found that there’s an integrated plugin from Gigya, but when I tried it, it wasn’t very stable. That is, after I tried to log on with my OpenID or Facebook ID, it simply hung. It did, however, provide a nice set of icons for various popular authentication providers (like Facebook, Google, AOL, Yahoo, …). The OpenID plugin currently installed doesn’t show such a set of icons for those popular providers, so visitors/commenters need to remember their OpenID identifiers and manually enter them. I wonder how many people would do that…

So, I’ll probably have to search a little further to make this process easier as I hope. I suppose the JanRain framework may be great, but I’m not sure if it’s well integrated with WordPress or if I need to do that job myself. All in all, this will be an interesting starting point for another research project of mine, which I’ll be doing over this summer. Hope to have some meaningful outcome and report the result before the beginning of the next semester. Thanks.

-H.

May 26th, 2009 | Tags: authentication, blogging, facebook connect, openid | Category: Computing Infra Related, Meta | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL