Alcides Fonseca

I’m sure you are familiar with the MyBlogLog concept. It’s a list of people that have recently visited your website. It works through a widget that reads a Cookie in your computer and saving it for the site owner to check.

Well, I am conducting my own experiment to do the same, but instead of requiring a MyBlogLog/Yahoo account, users just need an OpenId. As I don’t use openid for logging in or commenting (yet), only users who have OpenID integration in the browser will be recorded. This works fine with Seatbelt Firefox Extension, so if you are using it, you are being watched by the Big Brother.

According to OpenID documentation, form elements for openid should be called “openid_url” in order for browsers to fill the url automatically. I take advantage of this feature, and when loading the webpage, it that hidden field is not empty, I send a AJAX request passing the visitor’s openid as a parameter that is saved in a txt file (for now).

Yes, it’s as simple as that. I also have a simple script for printing the OpenIDs and I am working in order to fetch the hCard in the URL. For now I am using an external link, but when I got the time, I will make everything work together. It is a simple ruby CGI script (ruby’s CGI module is awesome!) and uses Mofo for scrapping the microformats.

For now, it justs let me know who visits me that uses Seatbelt and OpenId, but in a near future with browsers having natively this future, it will Rock! Oh, and it helps building whitelists of openids.