What does it mean to subscribe to an OpenID account?

[davidlevine]

OpenID accounts like davidlevine.livejournal.com offer Dreamwidth users the option to subscribe (by hovering over the OpenID icon or going to the account's profile page). However, subscribing doesn't seem to have any effect.

Similarly, an OpenID account can grant access to a Dreamwidth account. But since an OpenID account can't have a journal, I don't think this has any effect either.

Is this a not-yet-implemented feature? I can imagine that it would be very useful if a Dreamwidth user could subscribe to a LiveJournal user's OpenID account to include the RSS feed of that LJ user in their reading list, but this doesn't seem to be how it's working currently.

(By the way, how do I code a reference to an OpenID account so it's clickable and gets the OpenID icon? <user name="davidlevine.livejournal.com"> doesn't work.)

Comments

[sorchasilver]

I think they allow people to subscribe to Open ID accounts because you can get notifications for things like icon uploads. And the OpenID can grant access so that the user can see contact info etc if set to access only.

To reference an OpenID account I think you need to know the "ext_####" allocated to that account.

ETA: Just checked, and the ext_#### is the one you need, but needs to be entered as ext-####, so {user name="ext-3270"} (replace {} with <>) gets you sorchasilver.livejournal.com.

[coffeeandink]

OpenID was created to allow people to comment on other systems with verified identities, not to port over their entire accounts. I know Dreamwidth has gotten a lot of requests about improving the transparency of this and associating OpenID accounts with syndicated feeds and/or Dreamwidth accounts, and that they're planning to do a lot of this, but right now, these functions don't exist.

I'm not sure if you can code a reference to an OpenID account. You can code a reference to the livejournal account itself with <user name = "davidlevine" site = "http://www.livejournal.com"> or to a feed (if it's been created on Dreamwidth) with < user name = "davidlevine_feed">.

Also see: FAQs about OpenID.

[brownbetty]

You can code a ref. to and open-id account, uh.... lemme look it up, dammit can't find, but from memory, you code their name as foi-nefaste.livejournal.com. Hah! That worked on preview. But anyway, their name is coded as "ext_somenumber" although I'm not sure where you fidn the number.

[turlough]

There are probably other ways too but one way is to go to their profile and check the links for subscribe etc, they've got the number: http://www.dreamwidth.org/manage/circle/add.bml?user=ext_123&action=subscribe

[fangirlism]

Okay, I just tried that code (the <user name="user" site="site"> one) and... THAT IS AWESOME . I had been manually coding it previously.

[matgb]

What does it mean to subscribe to an OpenID account?

Nothing, I'm not sure if that's because at some point they'll be porting LJ content to your reading page or because they haven't disabled it for those accounts yet. It might be because they haven't decided.

Similarly, an OpenID account can grant access to a Dreamwidth account. But since an OpenID account can't have a journal, I don't think this has any effect either.

Correct, and I hope it gets fixed when they've time. Worth noting that the user experience logging in with OpenID here on DW is substantially better than on LJ, and that's before they've really started.

And yeah, you need to know the ext number, which is where the profile comes from.

[stepps]

I'm going to presume that once that magical feature of importing an LJ or LJ clone friends page to your DW reading page, those LJ users will display as their OpenID names. But then, this is just how I'd deal with that feature when it comes up, I might be way off base.

If that's how it is going to work, it makes sense that one can subscribe/grant access to an OpenID, and therefore allow editing of a reading list from multiple LJ/clone sites from DW, instead of having to edit your friends/reading lists on those sites to edit what you see in DW.