DuoMesh Project Blog

OpenID is an open source login system. It allows users to use a URL such as http://sebflipper.myopenid.com as a login name, this allows users to use their OpenID username/URL to login to multiple websites without having to register for them first.

When a user encounters a website that supports OpenID they can enter their username and the website will then redirect the user to their OpenID login page, in my case it will redirect me to myopenid.com which will handle the login on behalf of the originating website. Once the user has logged in and accepted that they want to share their information on the website they were viewing, myopenid.com will send a request back to the originating website to say that the login was accepted.

At the moment only a small number of websites support OpenID such as LiveJournal and Technorati, but more websites are starting to see the potential of a single login.

A video of OpenID in action can be found on Simon Willison’s Weblog [Source: Digg.com - 23 December 2006]

I have tried playing around with the demo samples provided from Videntity.org and I have managed to login and authenticate myself using their example scripts. The only problem I have encountered so far, is with trying to fetch details about the user such as their email address and name. As the only thing I can get back from their examples is weather the user is authenticated or not.

I may try and integrate it with DuoMesh, but it may require another database table or amends to the existing user table. Also there would be problems with conflicting user profile information as currently I have been unable to fetch details about the user from OpenID authentication servers.

Today I had my interim presentation, explaining my ideas, technology used and my aims and objectives. My presentation was with Leon Cruickshank and Angelina Karpovich who seemed positive towards my ideas.

I think the presentation went well, though it went a lot quicker than I though it would and I didn’t get to show a demo of the website working on my mobile phone, but I think they got the idea. Most of their questions were about the functionality of the site and they were interested in the way that content/feeds are tagged and if the website will actually work on a Playstation 3 or the Xbox 360.

The Playstation uses a version of the NetFront browser which is also used in the Sony PSP. [Source: Wikipedia - 14 December 2006]
As I have a PSP which I have been testing my development on and this so far has been rendering my website correctly.

Currently the Xbox 360 does not have a built in internet browser [Source: Joystiq.com - 12 December 2006] though this maybe provided in a software update.

Each Internet browser whether its a fully blown desktop browser like Firefox, Internet Explorer or a mobile phone will send out a request with each connection it makes with a User Agent tag.

This tag usually contains the name of the browser and what version is it. It can also contain what the system default language is as well as other information. This could be used to direct users to a mobile version of the site or to the normal website.

There is an open-source project called WURFL which is basically a set of XML file that contain information about capabilities and features of over 9000 wireless devices. Its possible to use this information to redirect people using a mobile device to a more appropriate version of the site.

Using the PHP modules they provide with the software you can use this command to redirect users to a mobile version of the site:

[Source: dev.mobi - 6 December 2006]

The only problem with this method is that its not guaranteed to have all and new mobile devices in its database. So not all users will be detected and redirected correctly.

I could use this method combined with option to view the full site or the mobile version.

By default all websites contain www. This is something that web users have become familiar with, but many websites are now automatically removing the www. from the URL to make their domain shorter and cleaner. According to some websites this also improves your ranking on Google.

To achieve this on an Apache web server, add the following code into a file called .htaccess

[Source: bigbold.com - 1 December 2006]