Jeremy Smith's blog

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  1. [ # ]

    Fluid.app is good stuff. That is all.

  2. [ # ]

    A piece of information that would have been really nice to have about 12 hours ago: upgrading to Leopard completely messes up fink. I'm in the process of trying to repair things now. It's been a very time intensive process, and it doesn't look like it's going to be getting any easier any time soon.

  3. [ # ] It's very commendable that the MSIE team has decided that IE8 will do "Standards Mode" by default. It's not often people change their minds. Especially in this case where they are going to cause themselves a huge PITA when they have to assuage all of their "intranet costumers" to upgrade to yet-another-browser-version that is going to break their sites. It's good to see this kind of support coming out of Microsoft.

PBWiki Goes OpenID (Sorta); Ning Needs It

PBWiki went OpenID-enabled in a weird way. You can't just show up and login via OpenID. You need to have an already existing PBWiki account that you can link to an OpenID endpoint.

I don't know why they implemented it that way. And the only reason I am blogging about it is that I broke my self-imposed moratorium on playing around with new-fangled Internet things and started messing around with Ning.

Ning, as a platform, is surprisingly potent. There's a lot you can tinker with under the hood and a lot of JavaScript voodoo available. It's a very competent platform if an organization wanted to prototype some social networking what-have-you's. But the one glaring thing messing is the ability to login via OpenID.

For example, let's say Case, as a large and diverse institution, wanted to experiment with social networking to do things like court alumni for money or provide faculty with buzzword-y ways to interact with their students. Several requirements that would pop up is to make sure that the social networking site falls under the "Case brand." That means a case.edu URL and being able to make the website look like a Case-branded website. Both are easily accomplished. Another requirement would be to make sure users logged on to the social networking site with their Case credentials. We've got an OpenID provider; we just wish we could use it.

Yep… the entire point of me writing this post is to whine about wanting Ning to have OpenID. I did poke around their developer forums and found these two threads which sound promising albeit in a someday-in-the-future sort of way.

Topic: OpenID circa 12/2007:

Is Ning planning to implement OpenID?

We don't have any plans to adopt Open ID. Also it'd be very tricky to replace the Ning ID login system with one using OpenID, but it is probably possible. The implementations I can think of that wouldn't involve the rewriting of many components would require some creative / hacky designs :)

SSO integration circa 1/2008:

An API that allows transparent SSO integration of external applications with your social network is still on roadmap but it is not planned for the next few releases.