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

[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.