AIM OpenID Login in Motion
From the I-should-have-blogged-about-this-literally-a-month-ago department, AIM OpenID Login has been released as part of Six Apart’s Motion package. That was a mouthful, so allow me to unpack the sentence.
AIM OpenID Login is a small plugin I wrote in 2007 that lets anyone with an AOL account – including AIM users – easily log into your Movable Type blog to post a comment. Motion is a plugin for Movable Type that turns the blogging software into a social networking platform. It’s currently a public beta, so you can download it for free while Six Apart works to smooth out the edges. According to the FAQ, its features – including, presumably, AIM OpenID Login – will be folded into the standard Movable Type application by version 4.25.
Early last month, a product manager at Six Apart e-mailed to notify me that my plugin would be incorporated into a future Movable Type release. He did not ask my permission. As it happens, I’d already given explicit permission by licensing the plugin under the GNU General Public License, as I was required to. So this e-mail was simply a courteous heads-up. As you might imagine, I’m quite pleased that one late night of coding has led to such visibility for my code. If only I got such a high ROI with this week’s complement of problem sets.
Even if you have no inclination to turn your blog into a full-fledged social networking service, AIM OpenID Login lowers a barrier that keeps your readers from becoming commenters.
