<p>I&#8217;m sure you are familiar with the <a href="http://mybloglog.com">MyBlogLog</a> concept. It&#8217;s a list of people that have recently visited your website. It works through a widget that reads a Cookie in your computer and saving it for the site owner to check.</p>

<p>Well, I am conducting my own experiment to do the same, but instead of requiring a MyBlogLog/Yahoo account, users just need an OpenId. As I don&#8217;t use openid for logging in or commenting (yet), only users who have OpenID integration in the browser will be recorded. This works fine with <a href="https://pip.verisignlabs.com/seatbelt.do">Seatbelt Firefox Extension</a>, so if you are using it, you are being watched by the Big Brother.</p>

<p>According to OpenID documentation, form elements for openid should be called &#8220;openid_url&#8221; in order for browsers to fill the url automatically. I take advantage of this feature, and when loading the webpage, it that hidden field is not empty, I send a <span class="caps">AJAX</span> request passing the visitor&#8217;s openid as a parameter that is saved in a txt file (for now).</p>

<p>Yes, it&#8217;s as simple as that. I also have a <a href="http://alcidesfonseca.com/log.py">simple script for printing the OpenIDs</a> and I am working in order to fetch the hCard in the <span class="caps">URL</span>. For now I am using <a href="http://junk.ideias3.com/hCard/?url=alcidesfonseca.com">an external link</a>, but when I got the time, I will make everything work together. It is a simple ruby <span class="caps">CGI</span> script (ruby&#8217;s <span class="caps">CGI</span> module is awesome!) and uses <a href="http://mofo.rubyforge.org/">Mofo</a> for scrapping the microformats.</p>

<p>For now, it justs let me know who visits me that uses Seatbelt and OpenId, but in a near future with browsers having natively this future, it will Rock! Oh, and it helps building <a href="http://simonwillison.net/2007/Jan/22/whitelisting/">whitelists of openids</a>.</p>