DuoMesh Project Blog

The core feeds types that the script will support are:

• Standard text based feeds e.g. BBC News
• Image based feeds from such image galleries as Flickr
• Audio/Video based feeds such as Podcast like Diggnation (weekly technology video Podcast)

Other feed types:

• Email
• Weather
• Access to non-RSS feed information by taking a website and only stripping out the text

So far I have implemented standard text based feeds and image based feeds see: http://beta.duomesh.com for the latest development build.

After spending about 2/3 days testing and trying to implement OpenID into DuoMesh, I have managed to integrate with the login mechanism.

Registering with DuoMesh only allows you to use 4-15 characters and only contains letters and numbers, this prevents people from registering with a domain style username (e.g. users cannot register say duomesh.com as a username), this is how OpenID works, using a URL as a username. This means that I can simply use one login box to log both users registered with DuoMesh and people using an OpenID to login.  As OpenID passwords are verified by the identity provider, the password box is automatically disabled when a user starts typing a URL in to the login box, clicking on the password input box will prompt the user that they have entered (or started to enter) an OpenID and that the password is not required by DuoMesh (but authenticated via their identity provider).

Users from DuoMesh and OpenID are automatically entered into the same ‘user’ table, when a user logs in with OpenID the system will check to see if they exist in the database, if not the system will automatically create a new user with their OpenID as the username. The only difference between a standard account and an OpenID account is that the user of an OpenID account cannot change their password.

To show that OpenID is accepted on DuoMesh I have placed a small OpenID icon in the username field which will allow users to  identify that they can use their OpenID identity. This will also be displayed on the registration form, that registration is not required.

When creating a dynamic website, the developers need to take in to consideration abuse from spam.

Where the content of the website is subject to user submission, you run risk of getting abused by advertising, automatically submitted from spam bots, to promote their products and services.

To combat this potential problem an additional layer of security can be added to detect whether the client is human or a computer. This method is called CAPTCHA which is short for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” [source: Wikipedia - 7 January 2007].

This approach usually involves supplying the user with an image, which they are asked to identify by typing a response to the image (e.g. supplying text as an image for the user to duplicate into an input box below).

There are a range of open-source scripts that work with PHP, that allows developers to integrate CAPTCHA into their script. The script that I have chosen to work with is called freeCap this provides users an image which they are asked to replicate into a box below.