So after I went to a great deal of effort to compile a custom version of php on dreamhost to support GMP (long integer library) and jumped through several other hoops just to get openid support working I forgot to change the trust_root after I changed the URL. Anyway long story short openid logins are now working.

If you don’t know what that means check out a site like myopenid.com which will explain all about it. However, if you have a livejournal or other sixapart hosted blog you may already have your own openid. Google will reveal all if you ask.

I’ve been avoiding doing anything with my blogs for a long time. I’d come to dislike the look of my blogs and the nasty fragile hacks that held my movable type system together so I started putting off doing things with my blog until I could change the system. After my experiences hacking movabletype to support threaded comments (version 4 might be better) I decided I wanted an open source blogging system written in a more appropriate language than perl¹ with a well designed extension system. Ruby on rails still seems like the right way to go but I didn’t like the typo codebase and mephisto just isn’t mature enough yet to have the extensions I need, e.g., openid, and it’s API still seems to be in flux.

The fact that I’m going to be applying for jobs soon finally inspired me to do something about my web presence and despite being written in php I settled on wordpress based on it’s ease of modification and the amazingly comprehensive list of open source plugins availible. Someday I may still switch to mephisto² or my own custom code but at the moment wordpress can’t be beat as a practical blogging solution for those of us who want extensive customizations and non-standard features.

For anyone who is interested in the code I’ve written to customize this blog or other related issues I’ll be posting them on my wordpress page.