I’ve got a round of updates to run on the servers, meaning everything will be briefly unavailable later today. We’re generally back up and running within a couple of minutes. If this conflicts with something you’ve got planned, now’s the time to tell me. Otherwise, sorry in advance for the inconvenience.
The notion of single sign-on (SSO), or one “identity” you can use to access services across the web, has been a hot topic of late. Just last week, Google both announced services to allow you to sign into supporting websites using your Google credentials. Within an hour, Facebook announced a competing service. Not to be left out, I’ve been working on something similar for Stratepedia.
This is actually something that’s been in the works for most of this calendar year. Our goal is to let you access everything you need on Stratepedia–whether it be in Depot, the Learning Labs, Coaching Calendar, Dossier, or even commenting on this blog–with one username and password. There are a handful of ways we can pull this off from a technical standpoint, and I’ve spent most of the year experimenting with these different options. I’d tentatively selected a method I thought would work pretty well, but had problems getting it to fly with the Learning Labs. It would have also involved another account migration–similar to what happened when we moved from the Content Enhancement Library to Depot–which would have meant an extra step for you.
Meanwhile, there’s been an open source identity service called OpenID out there for a few years now. The core ideas behind OpenID are that (a) it’s “open,” as the name suggests, meaning your identity is not tied to a proprietary provider (as is the case with Facebook’s system); and (b) it’s decentralized–if your identity provider shuts down, for some reason, you can choose another one and be back up and running relatively quickly. We looked at OpenID off and on but figured it was a little too esoteric and techy to put to good use here.
Then something interesting happened. Several big players announced support for OpenID–namely, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and AOL. All of a sudden, OpenID became a little more mainstream, and therefore feasible as a SSO solution for us. The goals are now relatively simple:
While we’re getting ourselves situated to use OpenID, you can actually get going with this nifty service yourself. First, watch this short video to get a quick overview of OpenID and how handy it is.
Next, you can create an OpenID identity for yourself. The OpenID consortium provides a list of public OpenID providers–or, as I mentioned, if you’re a member of a service like AOL or Yahoo, you’ve already got an OpenID identity.
Finally, try it out. Login via OpenID has been cropping up across a number of sites. OpenID got its start in blogging, so a great number of blogs will allow you to log in via OpenID to leave a comment (check out Sue Woodruff’s blog “For Your SIMformation” for a start).
We’ll be working more on this in the coming weeks, so keep an eye on this blog for the latest as we incorporate OpenID into Stratepedia. Any questions? Leave a comment on this post, or e-mail us at help@stratepedia.org.
After a long week of getting Coaching Calendar up and running for the Virginia CLC schools, I’m taking a brief break and catching up on other projects today. First up: I’ve added the following feeds to feeds.stratepedia.org, our one-stop-shop for CRL and SIM-related RSS feeds. For those of you who haven’t latched onto an RSS reader yet, this is the next best thing.
New feeds:
Sometime this week, I’m going to shut down the S.O.S. (that’s “Stratepedia Online Support”) section of the Learning Labs. I thought providing a level of peer support was a good idea, but it never really caught on in this case and I think confused more than it helped. Not to worry: Our Stratepedia Guidebooks are still online, and you can always e-mail your questions to us at help@stratepedia.org.
If you have any questions about this transition, drop me an e-mail or leave a comment.
In other support-related news, Amber and I are in the process of revisiting and revising the aforementioned Guidebooks to make sure they address the kinds of questions we find ourselves answering more often than not. These new Guidebooks will be rolled out as we get them done and will be available for free in both web-based and PDF formats. The latter is suitable for printing, if that’s your liking.
We’re using a great new application I found a few weeks ago called ScreenSteps. It’s great for creating how-to guides for anything to be done on a computer, and can be exported to blogs (if you’ve been following my series on Goodreads you’ve seen ScreenSteps in action), straight HTML, or PDF. I think Depot’s Guidebook will be updated to this new format within the next few weeks; other guidebooks will follow.
But that’s not all! Keep following Hello (the blog you’re reading right now) for tutorials, case studies, and anything else that might not fit within the context of our guidebooks. If you’ve got tips or success stories to share with others, let us know and we’ll showcase your work within Hello’s virtual pages.
To recap: S.O.S. is going away, the Guidebooks are staying put but will be getting a significant facelift (and PDF versions), and we want to showcase your tips and successes on our blog. Thanks!
I am in the process of transferring the stratepedia.org domain to a new registrar. I’m down to the final step and plan to finalize the transfer beginning Friday evening. I won’t bore you with the details, but am telling you because it could lead to some downtime over the weekend on everything on Stratepedia. The last time I had to do this things went pretty smoothly, though.
October’s been a busy month here at Stratepedia World HQ–on top of the new guidebooks and the blog facelift, we’ve just unwrapped a new look for Stratepedia’s main page. Amber’s putting her Photoshop chops to good use–watch the bulletin board to grow over time.
