MicroID Plugin for WordPress

Posted byRichard K Miller 32 Comments on MicroID Plugin for WordPress

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)

32 replies on “MicroID Plugin for WordPress”

  4. 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?

  5. 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.
  6. 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?

  9. 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’

  10. 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?

  11. 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.

  12. 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.

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