Mood: Geeky
Sometimes I think my pages include more metadata than data. Ahh, well . . . at long last
succumbing to the need to serve valid MicroIDs for each page of my own Blosxom installs (rather than simply
for the first page), I bring you MicroID for Blosxom. MicroID will generate an arbitrary number of
MicroID <meta> tags (for multiple claim emails) for your templating pleasure.
The difficulty with dynamic sites is that the MicroID contains the URL of the page signed, requiring pages to be signed on-the-fly as they're created. A precomputed MicroID for, say, the root level of a weblog, would become an invalid assertion over any other pages within.
For those of you who don't know, MicroID is a claim verification protocol allowing anyone with access to your email address to verify your ownership or control of your web pages. What it amounts to is the SHA-1 or MD5 signing of the page URL with your email address. Thus, you're able to attach your email address to pages, but only people who already know your address will be able to "read" it.
It's really no more secure in se than putting a <link rel="author" /> or any
number of other semantic tags in your documents, as anyone who wants to could assert your authorship of
an arbitrary document. However, it does provide a way for you to claim authorship without revealing
personal details to anyone but the party you wish to convince. Thus the utility of MicroID is not in
accountability (as it's too trivially forged), but in assertion of ownership.