March 30, 2006...11:55 pm

MicroID Plugin for WordPress

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I recently learned about MicroID, a microformat for verifying ownership of content on web pages, from a post on Phil Windley’s blog. MicroID, which is a simple hash of an email address and a URL, can be used to claim ownership of a blog, a blog post, or a blog comment.

Phil developed a MicroID plugin for MovableType.

Likewise, I created a MicroID plugin for WordPress [zip].

This WordPress plugin does three things:

  1. Inserts a MicroID meta tag in the head of your blog. This is calculated from the administrator email and the blog URL listed in your WordPress blog’s General Options.
  2. Attaches a MicroID to each post. This is calculated from the email address of the author of that post (which may be different if your blog has multiple authors) and the permalink of that post.
  3. Attaches a MicroID to each comment. This is calculated from the email address and URL submitted with each comment.

This a very new concept with little practical application so far, but the possibilities are interesting: “Blog comment systems can check the given email address against a MicroID from the entered home page link to help reduce link spamming and blatant spoofing.” (microid.org)

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28 Comments

Filed under Main, WordPress

28 Comments

  • Phil Windey
    March 31, 2006 at 11:12 am
    Nice work Richard! Now it’s as easy to do in WP as MT.
  • Hans Gerwitz
    June 8, 2006 at 10:22 am
    Any chance we’ll see an update that uses the presently-specified HMAC hash?
  • toolvicarious
    June 12, 2006 at 7:45 am
    Are you still working on this plugin?
    I get this error when I activate it :(
    I am running Wordpress 1.5.1.2
    What am I doing wrong?
    Help me please!
  • Myles A. Braithwaite
    June 23, 2006 at 11:38 am
    It seems like I made this plugin a little to soon. http://mylesbraithwaite.com/2006/06/20/microid-wordpress-plugin/ Sorry about this.
  • MicroID WordPress Plugin at Myles A. Braithwaite
    June 23, 2006 at 11:58 am
    [...] MicroID WordPress Plugin Published 2 days, 20 hours ago in Journal. Tags: microid, php, wordpress. Update: Found another plugin to do this, this one only includes MicroID’s in your Header, Post, and Comments. [...]
  • New MicroID Metadata at The Progress Bar
    June 29, 2006 at 4:56 pm
    [...] New MicroID Metadata Posted Thursday, June 29, 2006 by David Evans A month or so ago I talked to Fred Stutzman at ClaimID to get a better idea about what his new project was all about. The next day, Aldo was over doing a podcast here about identity. The week after that, Aldo interviewed Fred. Last week I met Fred in Person at the Identity Mashup. Today, I installed MicroID plugin for Wordpress and added ClaimID to my sidebar. I use a somewhat-hacked theme for the blog which doesn’t support sidebar widgets and I haven’t taken the time to figure out what edits need to be made. Needless to say, some progress is being made at Theprogressbar. claimID, microid [...]
  • MicroID Development » Usable MicroID
    July 6, 2006 at 4:04 pm
    [...] Richard K. Miller’s MicroID Plugin for Wordpress [...]
  • willnorris.com » Blog Archive » wordpress microID plugin
    July 7, 2006 at 1:13 pm
    [...] wordpress microID plugin 07 Jul 2006 (I was going to post this as a comment to Richard’s post which I found from the microID blog, but then it started to get kinda long so I decided to just write this here). [...]
  • We Saw a Chicken … » Blog Archive » claimID/microid for WordPress: fixed!
    August 9, 2006 at 6:31 am
    [...] claimID/microid for WordPress: fixed! I like the idea of claimID — a simple web ID system — and have been trying to mark all my online content with it. I installed Richard K Miller’s MicroID Plugin for WordPress, but it didn’t seem to want to correctly fingerprint the top level of my site. [...]
  • Derek
    August 18, 2006 at 2:39 pm
    Any type of readme available for this plugin? I think a few people may very well scratch their heads wondering if there is an admin interface, or any other type of user editing required in order to get the plugin working.
  • links for 2006-08-22 at protocol7
    August 22, 2006 at 6:19 am
    [...] MicroID Plugin for WordPress (tags: by:richard_k_miller identity microid plugin wordpress security) [...]
  • EcoGraphic
    September 4, 2006 at 3:19 pm
    Any chance of re-working this plugin, or creating another to add the MicroID into the RSS feed instead of the page HTML?

    RDF tags create page validation errors, and it is really your syndicated content which needs to have meta data added to it in order to identify its origin.

  • Using Microformats in WordPress | blogHelper
    September 7, 2006 at 11:21 pm
    [...] MicroID Plugin for WP - Automatically attaches a MicroID to your blog, each post, as well as each comment. More information on this microformat is available. [...]
  • Microformats in WordPress nutzen at notizBlog
    December 3, 2006 at 5:53 am
    [...] MicroID Plugin for WordPress Von MicroID hatte ich bisher noch nicht gehört, aber es ist ziemlich simpel. Es erstellt einen Hash-Wert aus der E-Mail Adresse und der eigenen URL, welchen man zur Identifizierung verwenden kann. Also im Prinzip so ähnlich wie die Gravatare. Meiner z.B. ist 9198c94d942fa09454fa84b2ce447362d70abc1a. Das Plugin, schreibt diesen Wert in die Metatags von Wordpress <meta name=”microid” content=”9198c94d942fa09454fa84b2ce447362d70abc1a” /> zum Kennzeichnen des Blogs oder von Autoren eines einzelnen Eintrags. [...]
  • Adam On Life » MicroID - the coolest technology from 2006 you’ve never heard of
    December 21, 2006 at 1:48 am
    [...] I’d recommend adding the MicroID Plugin if you’re using Wordpress, or otherwise finding how to add it on your own. If you’re using this plugin, one benefit is that posts by other authors will show up with ownership to that author. This is great for what I’m wanting to use it for, as it’s more page specific than domain wide. [...]
  • Another MicroID plugin for WordPress | Another blog bites the dust
    January 9, 2007 at 3:02 am
    [...] A reader of this blog, Nate Olson, just informed me that there is another WordPress plugin for MicroID and is written by Richard K. Miller (Thanks Nate!). [...]
  • OpenID and MicroID enabled » SDLC Blog
    February 17, 2007 at 5:25 pm
    [...] to claim verifiable ownership over content hosted anywhere on the web”. I have installed the MicroID plugin for Wordpress, that attach a microID on each of the comments (based on the supplied email address and URL of the [...]
  • thingelstad.com - OpenID Makes Identity Easy
    May 11, 2007 at 3:06 pm
    [...] of URL’s. See my ClaimID page. It combines OpenID federation, with the MicroID (get the Wordpress plugin!) microformat (a topic worthy of another post) to allow you to verify ownership of URL’s and [...]
  • Jamie Thingelstad
    May 11, 2007 at 11:23 pm
    I’m trying to use this plugin, and have enabled it on my site, but the hash it is generating does not match the hash that I’m getting from claimid.com to validate a URL. claim ID gives me

    and wp-microid is outputing

    so obviously validation fails. I’ve triple checked that my admin email address is the same as the one on my openid (thingles.myopenid.com) and that the URL’s are exactly the same.

    Any suggestions?

  • Jamie Thingelstad
    May 11, 2007 at 11:24 pm
    Sorry.. let me un-HTML the two meta blocks

    claimid is expecting

    meta name=”microid” content=”5904a3c454eeeb4a91d942903c195cfa657962d5″

    and wp-microid is generating

    meta name=’microid’ content=’69668ef663714057de2bbc054bdfa404d586301a’

  • Jamie Thingelstad
    May 11, 2007 at 11:28 pm
    Okay — I did some more reading on this and I had the same “trailing /” problem that was cited above and mentioned here.
  • Mark S. Meritt
    October 15, 2007 at 12:24 pm
    Wonderful! I’d begin hacking the headers of my themes adding individual links from claimID. This is *much* better. Thanks!
  • Mark S. Meritt
    October 15, 2007 at 2:31 pm
    Curious:

    With http://potluck.com/ I had entered the trailing slash at claimID, and it verified okay. Because of a similar comment here for the plug-in, I made sure to add that trailings slash when adding a http://potluckcreativearts.com/ link at claimID as well. But that failed — mismatched microid #s.

    Lo and behold, I tested just to see, by removing that slash to yield http://potluckcreativearts.com I was able to match the # being generated for that page by the plug-in.

    Isn’t it strange that one site would need the slash included and the other would need it excluded?

  • Mark S. Meritt
    October 15, 2007 at 3:17 pm
    Ugh, still having trouble, sorry to keep bugging with so many separate comments. Bottom line is that it seems your plug-in is putting the microid in a different place and format compared to what claimID is expecting. That’s on top of this strange issue about the trailing slash. Any help you can provide would be appreciated. Thanks.
  • Mark S. Meritt
    October 16, 2007 at 7:38 am
    Discussion with claimdID support has gone about as far as it can go. They have given me some clues which helped me look at the source code the plug-in is generating. I haven’t done an exhaustive study, but best I can tell, following appears to be (aside from the trailing slash inconsistency issue I mentioned) the full situation:

    The plug-in acts inconsistently and not fully correctly. All claimID (and presumably others looking for microid) is looking for is that the one correct microid ### be formatted as and placed within the HEAD tags. But the plug-in generates two microid’s, and formatting and placement are inconsistent.

    On all pages, it adds an almost properly formatted microid tag within the HEAD tags (almost proper because the mailto+http:/sha1: is missing), but the ### is the same across all pages/posts in a given website, and I can’t tell where it’s coming from.

    The second microid seems to be handled in two ways.

    On home page, it is formatted properly as and placed correctly within the HEAD tags.

    On pages/posts, it is formatted incorrectly as and placed incorrectly outside the HEAD tags.

    Incidentally, claimID support also noted that the plug-in isn’t using v.3 of the microID spec, but they don’t think that’s impacting much here.

    Thoughts?

  • Используем микроформаты в своём блоге. :: #моск
    December 4, 2007 at 5:42 pm
    [...] MicroID Plugin for WP - Автоматически прикрепляет MicroID к Вашему блогу, каждому посту и комментарию. Подробнее. [...]
  • WP-SuperBlog.com » Blog Archive » WordPress Plugin Page Example
    January 20, 2008 at 3:31 am
    [...] This WordPress plugin does three things: Inserts a MicroID meta tag in the head of your blog. This is calculated from the administrator email and the blog URL listed in your WordPress blog’s General More Blog Resources [...]
  • Будущее тут: Подпись 2.5 | Футуриус
    February 9, 2008 at 7:27 pm
    [...] пример из моего блога. С помощью плагина MicroID автоматически подставляется к комментариям и [...]

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