onfocus

A centralized option for online identity management: TypeKey.

I'm home from Austin and I brought an intense sinus infection with me. Luckily this hit at the end of my trip rather than the beginning. It was a great time, and I'll post a conference wrap-up as soon as I can breathe again.

I'm off to Austin for South by Southwest bright and early tomorrow with an evening arrival. I'm looking forward to lots of great geeky conversations and fun. South by Southwest was the first conference to devote a panel to weblogs (in 2000), and many early adopters and people who helped develop and spread the format in the early days have been attending ever since. (And lots of people who inspired me to work on the web were attending before I even realized there was an interactive side of the festival.) This year I counted eight panels that are specifically about weblogs, with lots of overlapping topics. It'll be great to talk with people I only see at sxsw, and hear about ideas, projects, and life in general in person. I always leave inspired.

I'm also going to be speaking on two panels. On Sunday, March 14th, I'll be discussing the rise of aggregation as a means of measuring popularity with Erik Benson and Cameron Marlow. And on Monday, I'm going to ask Wendy Seltzer and Peter Kennedy lots of questions about where weblogs and law intersect. My speaking schedule means I'm going to miss many panels I want to see, and I hope people share their notes again this year. If you're going to be at sxsw, I'll see you there!

(psst. If you're going to be at sxsw with a cell phone or mobile device that can take pictures, there's at least one group space to share them. And you can watch this page to see them.)

Some friends in Nebraska bought a box of old photos at an auction. They found seven photos of the Oregon coast from 1937 in the mix, and they sent them my way so I could see them. They include some familiar scenes of Newport and Waldport. I have no idea who the photographer is, but it looks like some sort of professional vacation postcard collection (though they are actual photographs, not prints). I scanned them tonight so I could have a copy, and I thought other Oregonians may be interested too. Here are the full photos with no color adjustments:



They're showing up as a bit more yellow on the screen than they are in real life.

The pictures are very small, about 4 1/2 by 2 1/2 inches. I liked seeing the scans, because I could suddenly zoom in and see more detail in the photos. I've highlighted a few sections by cropping the photo, and taking out all of the color. The details are in a separate gallery here:



(This Alsea Bay Bridge in Waldport doesn't exist anymore. It was replaced several years ago with a new bridge.) You can toggle back and forth between the source photo and detail by clicking on the picture. Each photo has the year hand-written on the back. The photo of Newport Beach has an additional message, "What a thrill to see all this." I feel the same way about these old photos.

I redesigned my business site, pbcoding.com a bit. I still have some content I want to add (the "projects" page is just a direct copy of the "sites" page here), but the design is set. It looks much more like this site now, and it has tabs! My theory is that I've been studying Amazon.com for so long now that tabs just seem natural. I checked it in IE and Mozilla, but if you spot anything out of whack, let me know.

Jacques Distler is doing more work on the PGP-enabled comments idea. He's taken the signature method a step farther by showing how you can do automatic validation. By placing a PGP-key, auto-discovery <link> tag in your weblog (just like the auto-discovery tags for RSS, FOAF, etc.) that contains the URL of your public PGP-key, anyone should be able to validate anyone else's signature using just their weblog URL.

What this all boils down to is that you can build a distributed system for verifying identity in weblog comments. And your weblog becomes your central identity for all of your web contributions. Those who want to protect their identity can take the extra steps to use PGP and add the auto-discovery tag to their weblog, and those who want to remain anonymous or don't care about their identity can keep using weblog comments as they work now. There are no extra logins required, and no changes to the way you post/read comments.

Check out Jacque's post on the subject that explains how it all works in more detail: PGP-Signed Comments. (And his follow-up post: Notes on Comment Authentication.) He's working with Srijith, author of the Movable Type plugin OpenPGPComments, to add these auto-validation ideas into the next version of the plugin. I just added my pgp auto-discovery tag to this site. (Once I see their implementation of auto-validation, I'll see if I can incorporate it into the comments system here.)

As you probably know, Portland is issuing licenses for same-sex marriages. I've been reading the news and reactions obsessively over at ORblogs, and b!X has a nice local weblog round-up of reaction. I'm glad to see pictures starting to be posted. Frykitty pointed to some wedding pictures from yesterday. If anyone has photos but no place to post them on the web, ORblogs has a publicly available photo section.

ooh, ooh, I need one of these T-Shirts: Vote, F*cker.

If you can't get enough pictures of baby animals, check out these hilariously cute newborn kittens. [via offhand remarks]

Getting a puppy has made me trigger happy with the camera. There's plenty more where this came from.

This looks like the sort of hardware hacking I could accomplish: iPod battery pack. [via teedlo] I need to build this before my next road trip—the usual 8-9 hours of iPod battery life just isn't enough sometimes. It'd be great to have this backup.

huh. Tucows bought Blogrolling. It's surprising to me that ancillary weblog services are also being bought and sold. [via manly knitting]