Monday, December 1, 2008

Feature of the week: OpenID support in BibSonomy

OpenID is an open, decentralized standard, which allows users to log onto many different services on the web using the same identity identification (single sign-on). This kind of authentication is provided by a growing number of websites, including large ones like AOL, Google, Microsoft, MySpace, Yahoo and many others. And now for the good news - we are happy to announce that BibSonomy is among those!

OpenID makes registering at BibSonomy a lot easier. If you already haven an OpenID, you can go directly to our register page and click the link "register using OpenID" at the bottom:
In the next step, you enter your OpenID:
Then, you will have to confirm your BibSonomy registration at your OpenID-Provider (in this example myopenid). When you trust BibSonomy, you should activate the checkbox "Skip this step next time I sign in to www.bibsonomy.org" - then you won't be redirected to your OpenID provider the next times you log in to BibSonomy:

And finally you can complete your user settings. Please note that your name, gender and other information is fetched from the OpenID-server, so you don't have to retype all those details each time your register:
The next time you want to log in to BibSonomy, you can do this by clicking the link "Login with OpenID" at the bottom of our login page.

If you do not know your OpenID, it might nevertheless be the case that you already have one, e.g. when you have a Flickr account - refer to the official OpenID page to find out more details on this. Please note that OpenID will On the same site you will find information how to obtain a brand new OpenID, which can then then make your online experience easier and better - including BibSonomy!

Best,
Dominik