In the comments section, you’ll notice that I’ve enabled Gravatars on the site. That’s fine and all, and not all that hard to do. Here is the semi-cool thing.  I’ve set it up so that Ravsonic OpenID knows if you have a Gravatar or not.  It is also Pavatar enabled. Why is this cool? Well, if you have a Gravatar and a Ravsonic OpenID, you now also have a Pavatar.

 For those of you who have no idea what Pavatar is, it is a decentralized personal avatar system. Decentralized much in the way that OpenID is.  Instead of worrying about someone hosting your images (and going down sometimes in the process) you can choose to host your own avatars and place special link in your HTML code to let people know that is your avatar. So, when you pass your URL to Pavatar enabled sites, they will automatically go look for that special link and display your avatar.

What does this mean to you? If you pass in your Ravsonic OpenID as your URL(website), Pavatar sites will sense your avatar.  Where does this avatar come from? For now, we are checking to see if the email you signed up for your OpenID with has a Gravatar, and if it does, we are passing it on through. We are working the form to allow you to specify a separate Pavatar instead of your Gravatar. This was just something that was fun to throw together in 5 minutes. I personally hope things like this catch on and all OpenID providers expose avatars on the OpenID pages like we are. Your OpenID can truely become your sole identity on the net, which is pretty rad.

Coming soon: Exposing of hCard and vCard data via the same URL, so supporting sites can parse that info too!  (Granted, this one will have the ability to disable it/pick and choose which data to expose from the get go (and will be set to disable by default)). More soon.

I’m going to start off being honest. I don’t normally go on and on about the same old shit over and over again. Especially when it comes to things like web authentication schemes. But the potential behind OpenIDs is pretty rad. As I mentioned in the edit, I have the Ravsonic ID server running. Hell, I am using it right now on this post. You should be able to figure it out now.  I am in the process of making it a little nice and have a few more basic features (like a profile page you can set so when someone clicks on your OpenID at a participating site, you actually see something nice.)

 Why do I find it so cool? Oh, I don’t know. Let’s see. I logged into my Ravsonic based OpenID at this site. I then went to Zooomr and Livejournal and logged in using that same name. Because I already have logged in to one OpenID site this session, I didn’t have to actually “log in” at all. I just entered my OpenID and it logged me in. No password, because I’d already done that once this web browsing session. How f-ing cool is that?

Yeah, I am amazed by things that work the way they probably always should have until someone decided to fuck it up. Until today, I’d never wanted to attempt to include OpenID into my web services. I actually always planned on having my own single sign in system across all systems. However, this trumps all of that.

Ok, end nerd rant.  Go sign up for a Ravsonic OpenID (No, no link yet, if you have enough sense to figure out where to go, you will be able to appreciate it even if it still does look rough. I’ll post a link to it for those of you I know will bitch about how unpolished it is tomorrow). Very very soon, I predict, all Ravsonic related stuffs will be OpenID authentication ONLY (much like Zooomr is).  For now, we’ll still have the standard logins here. Probably not for long though. It just doesn’t make sense to.