billso.com

There’s a free WordPress app for the iPhone and the iPod Touch at the iTunes App Store. I posted this article with the app.

More information and a demo video are available at the official web page at iphone.wordpress.org

I’ve set up a billso.com page that displays my social networking activity from several different web sites. It took a bit of coding, but SimplePie handled the RSS formatting with little effort on my part.

Here’s an example of the WordPress template code that I wrote to handle the different time zones among Honolulu, my web server and FriendFeed’s RSS server.

I’m commenting my own posts when I want to add new content and links to an article.

If you have an ID on Yahoo, AOL, WordPress.com, flickr or several other services, you can use OpenID right now to log in to billso.com

This blog also supports Gravatar.

To leave a comment, users may log in with an OpenID, Gravatar or an ID from billso.com. (Added 5 April 2008)

I have enabled direct commenting to many of the article pages, but I do review, edit and delete comments because of privacy and spam issues. I have far more spam robots that want to post free ads on my site than I do actual readers. I find myself agreeing with James Farmer: comments that users post into a blog require a great deal of my time and resources to manage. Comments are twee.

Readers can e-mail me their comments, too. In your email, please include the phrase “I give billso.com permission to post my comments”.

Sometimes I refer to old articles in my blog, and those will appear as direct comments.

TRACKBACKS AND PINGS

Bloggers are welcome to post their own comments in their blog, along with a link to my article. My blog will automatically find and list these links as comments, although it may take 2 days for the comments to appear with my blog post. It’s not an instantaneous process.

As I mentioned in my billso.com article from 2 May 2008, if you are carrying high value items on your airline journey, do not check them with your baggage. Carry the items with you on the airplane.

Matt Mullenweg, the man behind WordPress, learned this lesson the hard way last week when he lost several high-end cameras and lenses on a US Airways flight.

Image courtesy of xrrr through a Creative Commons license.

Related posts on billso.com

• 15 May 2008: Don’t check cameras in your luggage
• 2 May 2008: Never check your computer on a plane
• 11 March 2008: Using Facebook as a lost-and-found department
• 3 March 2008: Building the perfect laptop
• 30 September 2006: Don’t steal my laptop!
• 28 June 2003: Where’s my luggage?

I recently implemented OpenID on billso.com. OpenID is a single sign-on (SSO) system that lets web users log on to multiple sites with the same username and password. SSO support is becoming a key success factor for social networking and social media web sites, as new users struggle to manage a growing number of passwords.

With OpenID, no one needs to apply for a user account on billso.com. They can use their username and credentials from another site to join billso.com, or to post a comment on a billso.com article.

Kyle Neath posted a long rant about OpenID yesterday. He won’t be implementing OpenID on his site because he thinks the system too confusing for users. I don’t think OpenID is that difficult to understand - here are two brief explanations from OpenID.net and Wikipedia.

Phishing phears

Kyle’s concerned that phishers might target OpenID users, and he uses PayPal as an example. That site has become a primary target for phishing attacks.

OpenID does have an identity system that lets an authorized user revoke their OpenID as a last resort. Anyone who uses an OpenID should select a strong passphrase, as I described in this billso.com article from 24 Aprill 2008. OpenID can also add multifactor authentication to their service. Checking a user’s location, or asking for a token or passphrase that only the user should have, in addition to the regular passphrase, would provide a strong defense against phishers. Virtual keyboards and other systems could also be used, as I described in this billso.com article from 17 April 2008.

The provider’s burden

I understand some of Kyle’s points. Any web site that implements OpenID for SSO could also become a provider of OpenIDs. I decided not to do this right from the start. I don’t want to provide perpetual support users who request a billso.com OpenID username. There is a system that lets departing OpenID providers delegate their users to another provider.

On 30 April 2008, I posted some programming code that lets a popular WordPress OpenID plugin use JanRain’s ID Selector tool. There are several providers of OpenIDs that can carry the long-term burden of maintaining these accounts, including VeriSign, AOL, Google, Flickr, and WordPress.com.

Universities could become OpenID providers. It makes sense to give students and employees access to a global SSO system, as long as schools are willing to provide stable, permanent usernames for their stakeholders.

Users can also purchase a personal identity domain for around US$10 a year and get a personalized OpenID URL.

Related posts and pages from billso.com

• OpenID
• 30 April 2008: Updating WP-OpenID to support ID Selector
• 24 April 2008: Change that password into a passphrase
• 17 April 2008: Virtual keyboards and monitoring software foil keystroke loggers
• 12 April 2008: Finding business contacts and passwords on the Internet
• 14 March 2008: Social media in action
• 2 July 2007: CXOs face malware email attacks
• 11 January 2007: How to create a secure password