charonred.com

Some may have heard of this, but I suspect many wouldn’t have, and I didn’t know about it until I found that I could login to my YouTube account with my Google ID.

Put simply, you register for an Open ID account , and then you can access sites like Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Live and many more with just the one username and password – much easier than having separate account access at each site.

You can get an Open ID from any provider listed here http://openid.net/get-an-openid , and with a central Open ID profile you can also link all your sites, as well as search friends/contacts from all your Social Networking sites and much more *.

As for security, I don’t think all the ‘big guns’ of the Internet would use it unless they knew it was a secure service; in fact many of them are sponsors of the Open ID Foundation, as well as having representatives on the Board of Directors; so it seems relatively secure in maintaining some of your personal information.

* the above is purely my summation of the Open ID service, please check with individual Open ID providers for exact usage,  features and benefits available.

A bit of tinkering with Wordpress today; I downloaded and installed a couple of plugins (and there are lots to choose from).

• Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button – plugin site – Help readers share, save, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, and over 100 more social bookmarking and sharing sites.

• Wordpress Navigation List Plugin NAVT – plugin site – The WordPress Navigation Tool (NAVT) plugin is a powerful tool designed to provide you with complete control over the creation, styling and contents of your web site’s navigation. The plugin gives you the ability to create unique site navigation from your pages, categories and users using a Drag ‘n Drop Interface

The ‘Add to Any’ plugin is dead easy to install and configure; but the ‘NAVT’ takes a little more effort. I needed to temporarily change permissions for its folder in plugins directory, then back again once it had created the wp-root.php file; and instructions for use could be a bit clearer, but I have it running and will make use of it, just need to study it a bit more first.