waffle

Hex Color Picker 1.3a: Same as 1.3 but with a French translation courtesy of Ronald Leroux. Tout bien.

Monocle Beta 1.1b1: Slicker search bar, better multiple-encoding support to make sure you can use search engines with some of the languages that have standardized on odd or multiple encodings. Okay, you got me. Actual encoding support. Monocle used to assume (”ass” out of “u” and “me” indeed) that you only used UTF-8 engines. Shudder. (And I did that being able to recite most of Joel’s Unicode post in my sleep. Double shudder.)

The bulk of the ground-work for supporting encodings as well as properly detect them when adding new engines was implemented in a concentration streak of a few hours (but with lots of homework done beforehand) and got one of my early testers to label me a “code ninja”. I’ll take whatever I can get. There are lots of places and ways to specify encodings, though, and I’m fairly sure there are situations I didn’t foresee. Mail me examples of tricky pages and I’ll get right to it.

You know. 3.14.

To emphasize a point from the previous post: Waffle now only accepts comments from people with an OpenID.

There are two major reasons why. The first is simply that OpenID is exactly the kind of standard I want to succeed - open, decentralized, secure, free and providing a useful function. The second reason is providing a better experience for people leaving comments.

You had to leave your email address and fill out a simultaneously intelligence-insulting and spam-robot-busting math question. Now you just have to login with an OpenID - and an OpenID simultaneously makes sure that you can stay anonymous if you want to and that no one else can impersonate you, even if they fake your name.

If getting an OpenID was hard or cost money, I would not do this. However, many of you already have OpenIDs, there are excellent fast services for getting free OpenIDs (including multiple ‘personas’) and there are excellent free services for hosting your own OpenID server and as many accounts as you want.

Don’t see using OpenID here as registering a magical ‘Waffle account’. OpenID will be everywhere within a year, mark my words, and you’ll be able to reuse your account everywhere without relying on any specific third party service.

So in conclusion, my current opinion on OpenID on Waffle is that I didn’t go OpenID-only without a reason. I’ve listed my arguments. If you want me to open up “accountless” commenting again, either counter the arguments I’ve already laid out, or present sides of the argument I haven’t even thought about.

Comments are now OpenID-enabled. And by OpenID-enabled, I mean I only take OpenID comments. It’s easy to register an OpenID account completely free, and many of you may already have one - AOL now supply one with every AIM screen name, every LiveJournal URL is an OpenID account, and so on.

The OpenID implementation I’m using is wpopenid, which allows you to pair multiple OpenIDs to WordPress accounts. I’m actually logged in with my URL’s OpenID right now instead of the WordPress credentials directly, if you can believe that.

If you want to know more about OpenID, you can’t really talk about OpenID these days without linking up Simon Willison - one of the creators of Django and thus a Python user, but otherwise perfectly respectable - who’s just been all over this stuff lately.