Got OpenID more or less working on a few of these websites. Macgirvin.com and cr.unchy.com for starters. I'll extend this to other sites as I shake any remaining bugs out. 

The biggest hurdles have been in handling profile data which isn't always available via OpenID. I'm hoping there isn't a big rash of spam since this bypasses our email verification. Just have to wait and see. I don't mind self-signed identities, but they have to resolve to real identities, or they ultimately aren't worth the paper they aren't written on. 

And hardly anybody supplies their birthday in the OpenID world. I don't care so much about the birthday as the age, since this is turning into a legal requirement for social sites; and also relates specifically to the laws (i.e. the DMCA) regarding storage of personal info for youngsters.

I'll have to code around these until these issues make it into OpenID proper. They will. You can't really have a distributed identity service that doesn't map to an identity or that doesn't play along with federal law.   My own company is working on something in this space but of course I can't talk about that. 

Oh yeah - please report any bugs you encounter to the bugs forum. 

It's crunch time at work so I've neglected to give a website update recently. Here are some things you may have missed if you haven't visited recently...

'Sharing' is now called 'Views'. It's hard to get the 'Share' concept across in thirty words or less. It's a personalized view of a website.

The entire comment interface was revamped to allow for comments on multiple object types. Instead of just weblog and forum articles, you may now also post comments on photos and profiles.

Profile viewing has improved, adding some more community features. It's also been linked with the buddylist stuff.

A lot of this stuff was here already in more obscure forms - I've just exposed it a bit more.  

Improved the name generators. The basic name generator will also do a website lookup and see if the domain is available. I've also added some options so you can lookup names by length - in case you're trying to find a catchy domain name that's less than 8 characters. Good luck... but the tool will show some interesting candidates. I've also added the same suite of options to the stage name generator, which additionally can use a predefined first or last name.

The name generators by default will not show adult terms. You can change your profile tolerance to add these to the mix. The profile tolerance may also be adjusted to include racier random quotes on the page footer.

Profiles have started to take on a bit of a 'myspace' appearance, though it's questionable how far down this path I'm willing to take it.  They will use your view/(share) theme and avatars so you can tailor the look a bit. I've also added article and comment counts in a few places so you can see at a glance who is a contributor (all three or four of them) and who ain't.

Oh, and I'll mention the music player also. I've got a bit more work before you can upload your own playlist, but that will be coming shortly. I've populated a few cool web radio channels for your listening pleasure.  

I will now return you to your regularly scheduled program.  

Since I'm working full time again, I've had to come up with ways of reducing the daily maintenance load of this and all my other websites. It turns out that dealing with wave after wave of comment spam is the most time-consuming chore. Since this is a moderated website, none of it ever gets through. But somebody (like me) has to look at each message that gets past the kiddie script filters and then the floodgate analyzer (the first lines of defense) and click to discard it. I'm sick of it.

This is all so the site can allow anonymous comments, but that isn't what the site is all about - and it's a very disproportionate maintenance task for such a low priority feature that gets used maybe three times a year legitimately and about sixty thousand times a year by spammers. So effective immediately, anonymous comments are gone. Site members can still comment on articles. It is only those that come from nowhere and belong to nobody (and are addressed to nobody and say nothing) that are being restricted. 

The avatar selector library was brought into the modern age last week. This is all part of the re-organization of image collections, since this is nothing more than a special case image collection. Once the special cases are dealt with, I'll start to migrate the rest of the photo albums. Anybody creating an album today will be dealing completely with the new interface - the old one is only there to serve up old pages.  Your photo albums can now have guest comments. Well, if you read the last paragraph, more appropriately would be 'member comments'. Eventually you'll be able to do anything with a picture that you can do with an article.

The ability to create newfeeds is now rate limited because of some unpleasant experiences I had working with a sister site to this one.  Anybody can have a couple of personal feeds. If you want more, you need to get more points (by being a useful and contributing member of the community).

I think it's interesting to observe how much 'software development' is actual technical engineering vs. how much of it is 'social engineering', implementing rules and policies, weeding out anti-social elements, rewarding 'good behaviour', etc. As time goes on I'm doing a lot less of the former and a lot more of the latter.

The 'Matchmaker' friend finder has now been installed. This allows members to find other compatible members for anything from drinking buddies or band members to marriage. The basic premise is a cooperating search, where you match your profile against what other members are searching for. 

An important piece of this application is the addition of several new profile fields. If you want to be found by somebody, it will be a whole lot easier if they can figure out what you are looking for.

The default is 'Not Looking' for anybody of any age for any reason. If you want to be found, you should probably change this. (My Profile from the 'Tools' menu). Until a few people do this, the result set will likely be limited. You might also consider providing your sex and age, as these might be important to somebody trying to find you.

You don't have to be looking for romance. You can choose to be found by people of either sex for any level of interaction you desire.

Oh yeah, to make things sweeter, there's now a 'point system' for folks that contribute to the site in various ways. Contribute, get more points. I'm still figuring out the reward part of the equation, but there are very likely to be desirable rewards for top contributors. One important point reward that's in place today is that contributors get top billing in the Matchmaker. 

Applicable contributions include writing articles and comments, voting on things, and inviting new folks. To make the Matchmaker thing work, it would help to have some more members. If you use the Invite link from the Tools menu, you can help us get a critical mass of matchmaker members, earn points -  and you don't even have to write anything.

Hint, hint. 

The theme for the latest batch of changes is 'online presence'. 

Online presence added - this is a little AJAX app to let you see who is online at any given time. I don't currently have a method to implement "I'm away", but it does remove you from being actively online after about half an hour of inactivity (I'll be tweaking this in the future to more accurately reflect what's going on). You will fall off the list if you leave the website or logout. 

I'm also adding 'guests' to the online presence instead of just registered members. I solved a lingering problem about how to identify guests individually instead of having 27 people showing up under the name 'guest'. The reason this is important is because solving it allows guests to enter the chat room (which is yet another AJAX app).

Oh yeah - the chat rooms... Now that I've been digging into some of the more esoteric ways of querying the database, I also solved another nagging issue, which is how to tell how many people there are in a given chatroom at any given time.

So now perhaps the chat rooms will get some use, perhaps not. We'll see... 

--

Next on the todo list for upcoming feature enhancements is going to be a way to share  and possibly merge your subscription lists. This way you can easily configure your view of the website to contain (for example) all of the music related stuff, plus your own weblog, and everything that your best friend has subscribed to. This is light-years beyond anything you'll find at social sites like 'myspace' and might be more accurately described as 'ourspace'. That's the plan anyway. The devil is in the details. And as you may know already from watching this site evolve (at least for those of you who have watched the site evolve),  you're likely to discover some even more interesting ways of using this ability which haven't even been thought of yet.

The 'categories' menu had to be split in two. One section for forums, and another for news. This follows the general site philosophy that categories are individualized and personal namespaces. OK, it also fixes a little bug which wouldn't display mixed category results precisely because of this general site philosophy.

The menu likewise multiplied and now contains a 'Tools' section for some of the stuff that was starting to clutter the main menu.

Seems like I'm always googling 'unit convertor' to find something to convert quanities of one thing into another. Problem is that I never bookmark the good ones and so half the time I end up on a mortgage convertor or some other weird thing which doesn't have the units I'm looking for. 

So I solved that problem. 

I also felt that a guitar chord dictionary would be a useful web tool. Mine isn't as pretty as some of the others out there, but it is reasonably complete. You want a hundred different ways to play an E chord?  Go here. What's this got to do with social software? Absolutely nothing... unless of course you're a guitar player who sometimes needs to figure out where there's an E7b13b11 somewhere around the eighth fret when you're using an open tuning.

You now have the ability to become a site member without revealing your membership to the outside world. Setting the "I'm shy. Make me invisible" button on account creation or through your profile (the 'My Account' menu item) will hide your profile details from public viewing, yet still make you a fully qualified member with access to all of the site member features.

Please note that regardless of your invisibility setting, active participation in chatrooms, forums, or weblogs will tend to reveal the fact that you exist.