Now Blogging with OpenID & RSS Aggregation

With some work, I’ve now enabled OpenID user authentication. It would have been a lot easier if I weren’t running Drupal 5 (for which a core OpenID module is not yet ready) or using a shared host (which meant I don’t control PHP at the system level).

Steps to get OpenID auth running included:

• installing a local copy of pear in my shared host directory
• installing OpenID Enabled’s OpenID PHP library
• installing jirwin’s Drupal 5 OpenID contrib module

This process will be a lot easier once a core OpenID module is ready for Drupal 5 and if one were in complete control of one’s hosting server. Meanwhile, it wasn’t so hard to enable the first credible global authentication system on a cheap shared host with my paltry technical skills ;)

I’ll be taking (the much simpler) steps soon to let me use this blog site URL as my OpenID.

I’ve also enabled Drupal’s core aggregator module and used it to expose a few open source feeds (Drupal, Sakai, OSP) on the site. The feeds are exposed in 2 blocks that categorize them (eg, the one Drupal feed in one block, the two Sakai and OSP feeds in another block).