It seems that the 40k blogosphere has settled on blogger as platform for most people. I’m sure this has more than a little to do with the fact that it’s easy to use, simple to setup, and integrates 100% with their gmail accounts. That’s all fine and dandy with me, but blogger seems to be too limited for my likes. I like the extensibility afforded to me by using a WordPress.org account. I can very easily add widgets, play with the scripting behind the scenes, and generally theme it however I like. But it’s not without it’s drawbacks.
Fully 1/3 of my traffic comes from FTW’s site, and a major disadvantage is that the blogroll’s on Ron’s site don’t pull pictures from WordPress blogs–only from Blogspot hosted ones. Since my site doesn’t have a picture, I presume I receive less traffic because of that. I’m ok with that though, but I have vowed to figure out how to get pictures on that blogroll! That’s really for another post though.
Another disadvantage is that I can’t sign in to comment on blogspot blogs automatically. Anyone who already has an account there, can just use that account to authenticate to the given blog and post. Granted, I could create a blogger account of my own, but it wouldn’t link back to this blog, so it defeats the purpose (besides, someone already has the handle “Warhammer39999″ on there). So, I diligently worked on implementing a solution called OpenID.
After getting it up and running (which was no small feat, mind you), everything worked swimmingly for months, but in the past two weeks, that all went to pot. Without warning, I’m suddenly getting failures when I try to post any comments on blogger sites. I always get one of two error messages (neither of which is any help):
OpenID error
or
Your OpenID credentials could not be verified.
The thing is that it’s only with blogger sites. OpenID works fine with Disqus, openid.org, and other sites I’ve used to test it with, but blogger hates it now. I s’pose I should go to Godaddy and see if they’ve changed my PHP version somehow, but aside from that, I can’t think of a logical reason why this would just up and stop working. And Google seems to be of little-to-no help on this one. 
That’s why I’m reaching out here to the internets. Is anyone else using OpenID for authentication? Have you had problems recently (or in the past) that are similar to what I’m describing? Any help you can provide would be mucho appreciated.
Until then, I’m forced to use Name/URL, and that means I can’t comment on many blogs. Hopefully I can get this figured out before too long…
Hey. When you figure out how to get your wordpress pictures to show on the blog roll let me know. I'll pay you in delicious cookies.
Same here. I keep looking for plugins that will make it happen, but so far I've come up empty-handed. If anyone figures it out, there will be much rejoicing.
I figure the key to it is to create a blogger account and figure out justhow they reference the images. If it's a specific image name, then we justhave to figure out how to duplicate that in wordpress…Who's our resident coding expert around here?
Actually, I've found a plugin that might just help:http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/feedme/I applied it after my most recent blogpost, so I don't know yet if FTW will pick them up or not, but it looks like I have thumbnails in my feed. After I make another post, we'll see what happens. Wish me luck!
…and FeedMe doesn't do at all what I was hoping. Sure, it adds thumbnails… but it hides all of the post's text when it does. Back to searching, then.
Do you use feedburner as well? I think I'll try to install feedme and seewhat's shaking. If it really sends the picture, it's proof of concept thatwe can do it.. we just need to figure out how to pull that piece of code.It's certainly worth looking into. Thanks for the lead!
It adds thumbnails to the feed, but I didn't see any proof that they show up in the FTW blogroll, sadly.
I get the same problem.I also want to work out how to get the Follower widget on wordpress.com – very annoying as I've been asked a few times how people can follow my posts.
Well, I'm not a .com user, so take whatever I say here with a grain ofsalt. I specifically sided with wordpress.org because of it's ability tocustomize the site very easily. For instance, there's a .org widget thatdoes exactly what you want:http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-frie…Sadly, in poking around the internet, it would seem that wordpress.com isn'tvery compatable with what you're trying to do:http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/where-can-…If it's anything like a blogger site though, and you're at all handy withcode snippits, you should be able to work some magic behind the scenes withsomething like this:http://www.expand2web.com/blog/friend-connect-w…If not, then the answer is almost assuredly to switch blogging platforms orjust go without. For the record though, the Google “Follow Me” widgetdoesn't seem very valuable to me. I put it up on my site on a lark to seewhat it does. From what I can tell, it's little more than a popularitymeter, or a personal blogroll for those people that don't have blogs oftheir own. I can't see how it actually feeds blogs to anyone.If you want your readers to stay current on your posts, the best way is justto have them subscribe to your default RSS feeds. Likewise, you could usesomething like Google feedburner to allow them to subscribe to posts viaemail (if you think RSS readers are too clunky–though most current browsershave them integrated in).Hopefully that helps a little…
I also have the same OpenID problem- it worked/works exactly once for me on each site, then never again. It's pretty weird.
For me, it worked for a few months flawlessly, and then one day *POOF*.I think I have an alternate solution though…
For anyone that is reading this after the fact, be warned that the plugin isincompatable with the google feedburner plugin (and maybe feedburner ingeneral). When I turned it on, it subverted all of my feeds, so I wasforced to disable/uninstall the plugin, and re-install the feedburner pluginto get it working properly again.While a coding genius might have no problem with getting this to work, thisis certainly not for the feint of heart…
You posted this on February 10th 2010 and today is already November 1st 2011. The bad news is we still have issues with OpenID and Blogger.