Sam Ruby

Less convenient? So, what happens when you're at a friend's house or public computer where you don't have your 1Passwd/Keychain database?

Plus, once you're logged into your OpenID provider, you don't have to enter your password for any sites which you already trust, until you log out. That's part of the advantage of a single sign-on system.

"Sites which don't support HTTPS can hardly be relied upon to be careful with my data, anyway." -- so, the vast majority of sites? People are going to use these sites either way. Most users don't even know what HTTPS is.

While it's unlikely an OpenID provider would sell out to DoubleClick, etc, if you're paranoid it's also very easy to use your personal website URL as a portable OpenID (it's literally two extra HTML tags in your homepage's header). You can either run your own provider using a simple prepackaged solution, or do what I do and just delegate to another provider, which you can easily change in the future with a quick edit of you homepage's header. Here's mine:

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://tlrobinson.myopenid.com/" />

There's even WordPress (and I'm sure others) plugins to make this trivial for non-technical users.

I agree OpenID is a little difficult to understand (as evidenced by some of the comments here) but it's actually very easy to set up a simple OpenID (many people already have one and don't know it... all AOL, Technorati,…

Some of these problems are inherent to PHP, but the WordPress team has decided to work with PHP, therefore the problems of PHP are also legitimate issues to raise with the WordPress team. That is to say, in accepting PHP as their language, the WordPress team must take responsibility for that choice, and that includes confronting the security risks that arise from the choice of language.

Sam Ruby made this same point, and he said it much better than I can hope to (he is responding to Matt Mullenweg in the comments):

"Those that contribute to PHP apparently feel the most pain concerning support of multiple versions. Yes, you can argue that they brought this upon themselves; but it is worth noting that at this point you are along for the ride. When I’m in similar circumstances, I tend to consider the karma implications of cursing the driver. In any case, some people who are along for the ride with WordPress happened to cross my path yesterday. Perhaps you are in a position where you can help them. To my eyes, I see a bug that was reported on WordPress 2.1, and the milestone on that defect is currently set to 2.3. Hopefully the users affected won’t have a tendency to kick, or scream, or rant too much."

http://intertwingly.net/blog/2007/07/17/Popular-Sovereignty

There is another way to look at this. Microsoft has faced 30 years of criticism of its decision to promote features rather than security, a problem that began with DOS and lasted at least until Vista showed…

I read this and wondered,

"what Planet software is Planet Haskell using that it's doing these odd things - oh, it's Venus? https://github.com/rubys/venus ... wow that's old... and doesn't that use something like filesystem storage for the feeds and couldn't this happen if you stored the xml with no character set specified and the parser messed it up on the way back in? Which since it's ending up with a windows encoding...wait, why am I remembering any of this....oh. checks credits for Venus, recordscratch yes, that's me, wondering why I fixed venus to run on windows 18 years ago"

https://github.com/rubys/venus/commit/210781768705d20dc3cbe672ec249012608f4225

Sorry about that. As I recall at the time I was the only person using Venus on windows, and I was just running a hacked up version on a local machine. There's some conditionals in there about whether it uses libxml2 or not (in modern python, it wouldn't need to), that call doesn't take a charset parameter and my guess is the problems begin as soon as libxml2 tries to parse the file on disk. I think my own version was frankensteined to the extent of using a sqlite back end so I didn't have to deal with windows files any more.

The author of Venus, Sam Ruby, is on here (rubys) but it looks like he hasn't checked in for a long time; last I saw he was over at fly.io.

Oh and the even funnier part of this all is, back when this was written, Sam's blog was THE go to place to look up the list of Mojibake mistakes you'd…

Maybe not "daily", but very frequently: here is a small selection of some of the small sites on my newsblur newsfeed list: [0]

http://www.jamesaltucher.com : Much self-pity, but also sometimes quite funny.

http://www.astrobio.net/latestnews_rss/news.xml : Is there life on other planets?

http://kaygun.tumblr.com/

http://www.friday.com/bbum : Coding, hardware projects, generally interesting.

http://bestyoucanbe.blogspot.com/ : Insights into the education system in regard to the raising of his neurologically non-typical son.

http://blog.lmorchard.com

http://ex-muslim.org.uk : Oppression of atheists in the Muslim world.

http://clojurefun.wordpress.com : Clojure!

http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath : Bad science, denialism.

http://blog.willbenton.com : Music, logic, programming, etc.

http://www.groklaw.net : Maybe not "small"; detailed analysis of important legal cases.

http://hicksdesign.co.uk/journal : Web design.

http://www.holovaty.com/ : "I'm co-creator and co-Benevolent Dictator For Life of the open-source Django Web framework"

http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones : Combines talented photography, photoessays, and study of the retina.

http://lee-phillips.org : I regularly check my site to see if it's still working.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca : Language issues; can be amusing or stupid.

http://freethoughtblogs.com/maryamnamazie : Freedom for women in the Muslim world.

http://math-blog.com : Infrequently updated, but often…

I also didn't know much of the difference between the two, and I also used RSS for my Hugo site.

At the bottom of the article there's, under "See Also", a link to this page comparing RSS and Atom: https://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared#major

It seems like the last update is from 2008, but the section on the differences has a few interesting items. I am not sure if it changed, but it says:

"The RSS 2.0 specification is copyrighted by Harvard University and is frozen. No significant changes can be made (although the specification is under a Creative Commons licence) and it is intended that future work be done under a different name; Atom is one example of such work."

The Wikipedia RSS page has also a small section comparing RSS and Atom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS#RSS_compared_with_Atom

"Technically, Atom has several advantages: less restrictive licensing, IANA-registered MIME type, XML namespace, URI support, RELAX NG support.[35]"

Hot take: we should revive ATOM instead.

RSS and ATOM are both nearly always machine generated and machine read so this may seem trivial to argue, but for those who are interesting in seeing the difference, this is a good article http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared

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When I wrote a forum software a while back, it was trivial to not only add a feed for new threads but also for new comments (per thread and board-wide). Made it very easy to monitor updates on all my devices. Most wikis have RSS/ATOM feeds for recent changes which is a great power feature for admins.

Mastodon is atom-based, I believe. Early twitter supported RSS / ATOM feeds which arguably made it easier to follow hashtags or news accounts.

Another benefit of RSS/ATOM is that you can plug them into chatbots or use them to mirror content. I would love to see syndication come back to the spotlight!