If past experience is anything to go by, the entire site will break horribly, at least once.

Update: it seems that my old template was so riddled with elderly WordPress code that the new version point blank refuses to use it. This theme will have to do until I summon the energy to redesign the site.

Update II: Huh, I seem to have fixed everything. Which is almost a shame, as I quite fancied flexing my puny HTML and CSS muscles on a new design.

Update III: Instead, I’ll be flexing my puny metadata entry muscles: Submit Response now has tags. Well, eight posts do. Only 1,242 to go! Don’t worry, I won’t be entering them all manually, thanks to the rather clever Simple Tags plugin.

Update IV: You can now use OpenID to leave comments on the site.

Apologies for the lack of Today’s Links lately: the jerry-rigged tangle of scripts that make the posts appear broke and I didn’t notice.

Last week MyOpenID added a pair of new features to combat ‘phishing’. That’s the trick familiar from those shady emails purporting to be from your bank which ask you to ‘confirm your account details’ on a site that looks just like your usual login page. OpenID is particularly vulnerable to phishing, since it works by taking you away from the site you’re on in order to sign in, which means that folk will get used to quickly entering their details and clicking the ‘Allow’ button without paying close attention to the URL in the address bar.

Now Simon Willison has launched a new service called idproxy.net, which lets you set up an OpenID identity based on your existing Yahoo! account and also includes a fairly strong layer of features to guard against phishermen, on top of Yahoo!’s existing protection.

Nice work. The usefulness of OpenID from a user’s point of view rests on the fact that it potentially frees you from the hassles of mainting squillions¹ of accounts for all the different sites you use, but achieves this by… asking you to set up yet another bloody account.

Sorry to keep banging on about this—I’m just rather taken with the speed at which folk involved with OpenID seem to go from raising concerns to suggesting solutions and implementing them.

1. I just checked in the application I use to store my passwords, and I have 87 different accounts on the web. Skimming the list, I reckon about two thirds of these could safely be replaced by my OpenID.↩

That doesn’t sound terribly exciting, but it has the potential to change the way we all use websites, particularly those that require you to login, or prove in some way that you are who you say you are.

At the moment, maintaining an identity on all the websites you visit is tricky—at each one, you have to go to all the bother of signing up, cross your fingers that someone hasn’t taken your preferred username, and think up a memorable-but-secure password—with OpenID, you maintain a single identity, expressed in the form of a URL, and can use it to log in to any OpenID-enable site you come across. In other words, OpenID turns the concept of having an account at a given website on its head, letting users be themselves all over the web. One URL, one password: simple.

As well as working as a web-wide login, OpenID also makes it possible for people to keep information about themselves in one place, instead of scattered across personal websites, social networking profiles, MySpace pages and all the rest. And if your information changes, it can be changed once, in one place, and the change is instantly reflected across every site where you’ve logged in using OpenID.

If you have a domain of your own, and are happy to do a bit of tinkering you can make that your OpenID identity¹; if you don’t, you can sign up with a number of free services, like MyOpenID (here’s mine).

At the moment, only a limited number of sites are using OpenID—mostly wikis and weblogs—but, with millions of LiveJournal folk able to use their journal URL as an OpenID identity, and popular sites like Zooomr, Ma.gnolia and Technorati adding support every day, I suspect it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a commonplace, if not standard, way of managing an identity online.

With all that in mind, I’ve added OpenID support to Submit Response—if you have an identity, you can sign your comments here with it, and everyone will know for sure that you are you.

1. I actually find this faintly disturbing—in a sense, now I am submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/. (I plan to change this to the currently unused jackmottram.com soon).↩

So, instead, here are a few little notes:

• The site is now powered by WordPress instead of Movable Type. This means I’ll be spending less time smashing my head off the desk in rage when posting new entries. It also means you can leave comments without waiting for them to be moderated.
• The site design is based on Hemingway, with a lot of modifications, because I couldn’t face learning enough about WordPress to write a theme from scratch. The result is rather messy templates, and even messier CSS. Hey ho. I’ll fix it all up at some point.
• See the wee ‘about’ bit at the top of the page? It’s an hCard. hCard is one of several microformats, which are clever ways of presenting information on the web so that machines can do stuff with it, without getting in the way of the humans reading it. There’s other microformat stuff going on too, using MicroID and xFolk. Some future posts will be microformatted using hReview, geo and the like. Microformats are really rather exciting—if you want to see them in action, try installing the Operator extension for Firefox.
• If you have a look at the bottom of the page, there’s a little bar chart, or ‘sparkline’. It shows activity on the weblog over the last six months or so—the darker and taller the bar, the more stuff was going on. Dinky, eh? I should probably put it somewhere more visible. It’s powered by the SparkStats plugin.

That’s about it, I think. Non-meta posting will resume as soon as I remember how to weblog.