MicroID Development

Antono Vasiljev alerts us to his MicroID Gem for Ruby:

Thank you Antonio!

Via Terrell Russell, news of a MicroID module for Drupal

I’ve been working with Tane Piper over the last couple days over IRC tweaking his (getting it Version .3 compatible).

He has implemented node-level and comment-level MicroIDs that appear both in the meta tags of the page and are then rendered into the node divs and comment divs directly via jQuery.

The jQuery is fired via javascript after the DOM is loaded, so currently, DOM-unaware spiders/parsers will not be able to see the node and comment-level MicroIDs. That said, I’m not aware of any MicroID parsers that aren’t working only at the page level (full URL, not sub-content *on* the page).

Additionally, the Drupal-generated user profile pages have MicroIDs.

His implementation is live on his site - Digital Spaghetti.

His code can be found on the Drupal site - Drupal MicroID module.

Great news! Download the Drupal MicroID module here.

Jim Walker was kind enough to create a perl module for MicroID, which you can now download from our code repository.

31d9367f8535ba0a667ad970b24d30f3  MicroID-0.01.tar.gz

Thank you to Jim for his work on this Module!

Eran Sandler has contributed C#/.NET tools to the MicroID codebase.  He writes:

It is a bit more generic and can be used with any hashing algorithm currently supported in .NET (SHA1, SHA256, MD5, etc).  The zip contains the class MicroID with a static function to either generate an SHA1 based MicroID (the default) or specify the name of the hashing algorithm.

It also converts the text to ASCII (so the hashing will work the same as in Python, PHP, etc).

Thank you to Eran.  .

Two recent contributions to the MicroID codebase:

• Eran Sandler has completed a MicroID implementation in Python. .
• Paco Nathan has completed a MicroID implementation in Java. .

Thanks to these folks for their contributions. This means we’ve got MicroID generators ready to roll in perl, python, ruby and java. Nice stuff! If you’ve created some code for MicroID that you would like to share, please drop us a line and we’ll happily post about it.

As an update to a previous post, here is some recent work in the MicroID world.

• Phil Windley’s Movable Type MicroID plugin has been updated by Tim Appnel
• Josh Peek has released a MicroID plugin for rails and for the RadiantCMS.
• has released a to test a Mediawiki extension for generating MicroID’s.

Anything that I’m missing? Yes - we do plan on centralizing these on a webpage, we’ve got to figure out where. If we can get accepted as a Microformat, we’ll likely keep track of these on the wiki. To that extent, in the next few weeks we’ll probably get started writing our RFC for the Microformats process. If you’re interested in proofing/contributing feedback, watch this space.

Of course, if you’re doing anything cool with MicroID, let us know! We’d love to blog it and add it to our growing lists of cool stuff.

Thank you to Jeremie for the nice intro. I’m Fred, and I will be working alongside Jeremie and Peter as we get stuff rolling over here. Now, as much as I’m a fan of talking at length ;), I figured I’d start off blogging here by sharing with you some great MicroID resources that have been popping up all over the net.

First off are two MicroID generation plugins for the WordPress blogging platform:

• Myles A. Braithwaite’s MicroID WordPress Plugin
• Richard K. Miller’s MicroID Plugin for WordPress

Myles mentions that his plugin and Richard’s are a little different, so you’ll want to see which ones answer your needs best. Next, we’re on to a MicroID plugin for the MovableType blogging platform:

• Phil Windley’s MicroID Plugin for MovableType

There are also some open source MicroID verifiers out there. I’ve been around the identity community long enough to know that verify is a value-laden word - so I’ll clarify. These verifiers are programs that go out on the net and see if a MicroID embedded in a webpage is the same as a “claimed” MicroID. These verifiers are very important, as they start to pave a roadmap for how we might build systems of trust on top of MicroID. We’ve got verifiers in two languages, and hopefully soon we’ll expand to more!

• The first verifier is a Perl implementation by Fred Stutzman.
• The second verifier is a brand-spanking-new by Chris J. Roos.

So this is really exciting. Lots of tools for you to start looking at and playing with, thanks to everyone who took the time to create them. If I’ve missed anything, drop me a line at and let me know or post to the comments here. Also - if this inspires you to write a python, php or Java verifier - we’ll also be more than happy to add it to our list. I’ll be collecting links related to MicroID at http://del.icio.us/fstutzman/microid, so adding that feed may prove useful to you. We’re off to an exciting start here and we’re happy to have you along.