Phil Hawthorne's Blog

Usernames and passwords are everywhere. With the web’s growing ability to reach more consumers, and offer more customised content, the amount of accounts a web-user can have has increased significantly.

Is it time to call Fail for OpenID?

How many usernames and passwords do you have? Email, Facebook, YouTube, MSN, Skype, Twitter, and that’s what I can think of off the top of my head. That’s probably the most common accounts people would have that use the Internet. Being a web developer though, I have a lot.

I’ve always believed that there should be a better way for users to be able to log into websites. Rather than needing to create a new username and password, there should be a way to authenticate securely, and when the user changes his password, it’s changed on all of his websites he has access to. That I thought was achieved by OpenID.

OpenID allows you to login to a website (that supports OpenID) with the one username (or URL) and password. Using this approach, you can automatically carry all your settings and information over to the website you want to access, without having to fill in lengthy online registration forms.

This technology isn’t new. Anyone remember the old .net passport? This was Microsofts attempt to centralize all of its logins to one account. For example, if you had a hotmail email account, that was your .net passport, allowing you to login to any Microsoft website that used the .net passport. This included MSN Messenger, msn.com, Xbox Live and Microsoft support. eBay also offered passport login for a short period of time, before it was scrapped.

I think Microsoft’s .net passport worked in theory. However because it wasn’t open, it wasn’t highly adopted. Bring in openID. Running the same kind of theory, openID allows you to login to any website, and keep the one account. You can manage which websites have access to what data, and if you decide you want to leave/close an account, you have the option to do so.

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Mozilla Foundation releases Firefox 5 three months after the release of Firefox 4, but is the upgrade worth it?

Mozilla, the creators of the revolution against Microsoft Internet Explorer, (please don’t tell me you’re still using the crud of a thing) released the next version of the Firefox web-browser this week: Firefox 5. For those of you who are using Firefox 3.x, you’ll find this as a massive upgrade, and a very awesome one indeed. The design is much slimmer, the menu bar is gone in favour of a chrome like “Give the web-page more screen realestate” approach. But if you’re upgrading from Firefox 4… well let’s just say I haven’t found any new features of Firefox 5 yet that I’ve used, let alone noticed.

Back in the day, new version numbers meant something. The minor bug fixes didn’t mean a product went from version 1 to version 2, no, it was more like v1.0.1. And if there were new features added in, but it wasn’t really a major upgeade to the product, then you’d get v1.1. Firefox 5, in my opinion, is more like a 4.1. But why has Mozilla taken this approach? The answer is Google Chrome.

Now before I go ahead and put my sinical hat on (perhaps it’s too late for that), I have to applaud Firefox for changing their internal processes, to have a new release verison out and stable within 3 months. Well done. But we need to get a few things in order first. Yes, you’ve done what you planned to do. But you’ve released a brand new verison of your software, which is really no different to the previous version, and yet it’s a major milestone? I don’t think so.

Recently at the WWDC in the US, Apple announced the release and some of the features for its new operating system, iOS. (continue reading…)

WordPress, the online blogging and CMS solution for many web practitioners, released automatic updates as part of its feature set for  the 3.0 branch. But is giving a script access to change itself really such a good thing?

Don't do it: Pressing that 'Upgrade Automatically' button might cause you more harm than good

I’ve used WordPress for a couple of years now. It’s slowly becoming less focused on blog posts, and becoming more of a content management system/framework. I’ve heard many web developers using WordPress with client sites, and have also had clients requesting WordPress as their system backend.

One hassle of web applications is installing, and keeping them up-to-date. Self hosted Web Applications like WordPress aren’t as easy to update like you would with your anti-virus definitions. It’s not like you can just click one button, and have the newest WordPress update installed onto your server.

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There are many different PHP frameworks out there. From the complex (Zend) to the light-weight and basic (CodeIgniter), each come with their own pros and cons.

Tonight I’ve finally taken the plunge to try and install a different PHP Framework for my new project I hope to start this year. Having used CodeIgniter for my projects since completing my Diploma, I think it’s time I start venturing out, and see some of the features other Frameworks have to offer. One Framework I’ve seen discussed and mentioned heaps is Symfony. I’ve seen many-a-job post requesting Symfony experience. So I think before I head further down the rabbit hole with drupal, Symfony is the next step to take.

One feature I love about CodeIgniter is its easy to install. Extract the files, and it’s working. After all, it’s just a website with some PHP scripts. However as I quickly discovered, Symfony is not that easy at all.

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Cooliris is a plugin available for Firefox that allows you to view photos from the web on an interactive 3D wall. The application also has a web-based flash application that allows you to display a 3D wall to your website visitors – even if they don’t have Cooliris installed.

I was recently introduced to Cooliris by my friend Gary, who was very impressed with the features of the Firefox Plugin. After finding out there’s an API for the app, we began investigating ways to use it on the web.

The API is pretty easy to use. Cooliris have an awesome set of documentation articles over on their website, and you can choose whether to use JavaScript or a flash object to embed the 3D wall on your site.

Because of Adobe’s tight security when it comes to cross domain scripting, you have to place a file called crossdomain.xml in your domains root directory. For example. http://philhawthorne.com/crossdomain.xml would be my domains root directory. You’ll also need to make sure that your MediaRSS validates as XML correctly. I suggest you check your MediaRSS is valid by using the tool at www.feedvalidator.org.

I setup the Cooliris wall on the website, and it loaded fine, three boxes appeared for the three test images, and hovering over the images showed me the image title. That was all good. But for some reason, the images wouldn’t load. Looking in the status bar of the browser, I can see the images being loaded, but they just wouldn’t appear. A lot of support posts on the Cooliris website about this issue all pointed to the crossdomain.xml file being the issue. But I had already checked that.

What’s strange about the Cooliris plugin is that when you press the slideshow button, the images would actually display. This made me think that the issue was something to do with Cooliris, and I had done everything correctly. I re-checked my MediaRSS to make sure it was valid XML. I changed the <media:thumbnail> tags from self closing (XHTML style) tags to <media:thumbnail> </media:thumbnail> tags. Still nothing.

Eventually I discovered the issue. It was actually a crossdomain.xml issue. The images I was serving to the Cooliris were stored on a subdomain. After copying the crossdomain.xml file to the subdomains root directory, the images appeared in the 3D wall.

Hopefully this can save someone hours of headaches.