Author: Mark

OpenID 2.0 for .NET now available

The OpenID open source project for ASP.NET (DotNetOpenID) now supports the OpenID 2.0 specification and is available for download on Google Code:

http://dotnetopenid.googlecode.com/

For businesses or developers that use the library it would be great if you could donate to this Open Source Project. Telligent is contributing to this project both financially and with our developers and we’d love to see more people support it! We’ve added OpenID support to Community Server 2008 (natively).

You can contribute via PayPal

You can also help spread the news:

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Some notes from Andrew who is the primary developer:

This release adds full support for OpenID 2.0 while preserving full backward compatibility for OpenID 1.x. It is a mature library with lots of help for diagnostics and debugging, and a balance between simplicity and extensibility. For a complete list of enhancements from the last release, check out the Version Changes page.

Here are the highlights of this library and particularly this release:

Support for OpenID 2.0 Relying Parties and Providers, including but not limited to these features:

  • Xri and i-name support
  • Directed identity support
  • More secure hashing algorithms (SHA-256)
  • Interop with Yahoo and other OpenID 2.0-only providers
  • Better security against replay attacks.
  • Send unsolicited positive assertions from providers to automatically log your users in to relying party web sites.
  • Much more comprehensive testing of common scenarios and possible security exploits.
  • More comprehensive HTML-based identity discovery.
  • Completely stateless mode support for Relying Parties (not even HttpApplication state).
  • New OpenIdMobileTextBox ASP.NET control.
  • All relying party ASP.NET controls now support immediate mode.
  • Improved support for custom stores that have to serialize associations (for databases, etc.)
  • Debugger attributes to make stepping through the code easier.

Graffiti CMS Blog Extensions now in Google Code

Earlier this week we published the Graffiti CMS Blogging Extensions. Graffiti is a publishing platform that makes it really easy to create great looking, interactive web sites. Graffiti can also be used as a blogging platform, as Jeff (of Channel9 fame) and other’s have done.

We heard from some bloggers using Graffiti that they wanted more blog-specific functionality. The new Graffiti CMS Blog Extensions is just that – it adds additional blog specific features into Graffiti!

For more specifics, Jeff Kazimer wrote up a great post detailing what all is included.

We also thought it would be great to publish the code for this Graffiti plug-in/add-on so others could see how it’s done. We also heard that people wanted to help contribute… so we published the code on Google Code:

http://code.google.com/p/graffitiblogext/

Live Writer Feature Request

I love Live Writer it has made publishing content, not just blogging, so much easier.

But Live Writer is definitely designed for blogging first and foremost and even for blogging Live Writer is really good for new content, and not so good at getting to old content. What I’d love to have is the ability to open and edit any content via a moniker as well as better tools for browsing previously published content.

For example, we are starting to use Live Writer for publishing content to Graffiti’s documentation and other site content. In other words, we’re using Live Writer as a tool to publish into a Content Management System. It works really, really well for this.

URL Monikers

Today when signed in as the owner of a blog you’ll typically get an edit link that takes you directly to the edit screen for the blog. It would be great if Live Writer could register its own URL moniker [1], maybe "livewriter", so that in addition to the standard edit links you might find a link "Edit in Live Writer" in content where the href pointed to:

image

For systems that had Live Writer installed clicking this link would cause Live Writer to be loaded locally and for Live Writer to attempt to open that specific post from the server.

Is there a way, even now, to open a specific post with Live Writer directly via a URL?

Maybe another short-term solution is to allow you to open a URL directly vs. having to go through the browse screen (see below).

Better Content Sorting

I’d also love to see better tools within Live Writer for sorting previously published content. Tools that allowed you to browse by publish date or title. The current open dialog is pretty limited (most likely purposefully):

image

[1] URL Monikers may, unfortunately, be something that is only supported in IE and not in FireFox

Google for business email

We’re thinking about signing up for Google’s corporate email.

When we started Telligent we used a hosted Microsoft Exchange SaaS and about 18 months ago moved Exchange in-house to support our 100+ person company. Over the past 18 months it has gotten more difficult to support.

For us email is like oxygen. We’re a distributed company with people all over the world so email is critical for just about everything we do. When email is not available, we’re dead in the water.

I am actually a really big fan of Microsoft Outlook and Exchange. However, since we’ve moved Exchange in-house we’ve now found that we have to do a lot more work to support it: upgrade drive space as we continue to hire; increase processing power and investment in servers for AD; deal with bandwidth issues if Internet is down in the office; general IT support for managing and running the server; and lastly SPAM (note: we’re about to start using Postini for SPAM after going through 2 different hardware solutions).

A couple folks have been pushing us to look at Google’s corporate email options. There seems to be a lot of benefit and it’s only $50/year. At $5,000/year it is much, much less than we spend right now and I really like the idea of freeing up our IT team and the servers.

What’s the consensus on using Google for corporate email?