Commenting on this (and other) blogs

I've had a couple of folks (Hi, Rich!) ask me about commenting on this blog, so I figured I'd take a moment to explain some of the methods of doing so on a typical Blogger blog.

Here's the comment screen. Unless they're a fan of spam, the blogger will at least have enabled the Registered User - includes OpenID  option in their blog settings, which gives you a bunch of options for  identifying yourself in a comment. Note that if the blog is restricted to JUST Google accounts, most of these won't work, and they can be potentially losing out on comments.

There's a bunch of options, and I'll take them in order. However, if you're on a Yahoo! group/mailing list, read to the end :D

First up is 'Google'. If you have a Google account (which means GMail, Google+ or Blogger) that's currently logged in on your browser somewhere, then you'll almost certainly find this is pre-selected and tagged with the name Google knows you by. End of problem: just comment away.

Next option? 'Livejournal'. If you select that, you'll get the popup to your right. If you have an LJ account, you can just type your LJ name in here and it'll redirect you via LJ to authenticate you.

The next two are similar. If you have a WordPress or Typepad account, i.e. your blog is actually hosted on wordpress.com or you have a Typepad account, you can use this option. (Note that just 'having a blog managed using WordPress' isn't enough. You actually have to have it hosted on wordpress.com.)

Next up, AIM - if you have an AOL Instant Messenger account, it pops up a very similar little form and prompts you for your AIM login - again, this'll take you to AOL to verify you're OK with this and set a cookie. This is, I suspect, a special case of the last option, which is the one several folks may want...

OpenID. This is a magic catch-all for a number of other sites that provide OpenID identity services. This is specifically useful for folks on a Yahoo! group.

If you're on (for example) the Lardies mailing list, you will have a Yahoo! login: this has associated with it an OpenID URL.

What you need to do to set this up (before you try and comment) is go to http://openid.yahoo.com/, click on "Get Started" and log in with that account. It will then take you to a page that looks a bit like the one on the left here: it's been a while since I did this for my account, and I can't remember whether it gives you an option to specify things here, but essentially what it'll give you is a URL of the form https://me.yahoo.com/YourYahooLoginName

Copy that URL, and paste it into the little form that pops up when you select OpenID for the 'Comment As' option. It'll take you to a Yahoo! webpage to confirm you want to do this, and then, bob's your Uncle. (In actual fact, it appears that all you need to type, once you've done the setup in the paragraph above, is yahoo.com, which is even easier!)

I've commented on this article via each of these (except the WordPress and Typepad ones, as I don't think I have either of those accounts) just to prove they work.