Over the weekend I was looking for a way to consolidate my online identities in a single place. I’m blessed with a fairly unique Polish surname, so even in 2008 the adamkocoloski.com domain is up for sale. However, I’ve always thought it a bit strange to host a personal site in a .com, even if that is the de facto standard these days. .net and .org don’t make much sense, either.
Enter .name. This gTLD was introduced in ~2001 expressly for individuals’ personal sites. I particularly like the model where an individual registers a third-level domain (i.e. adam.kocoloski.name) and the entire second-level domain (kocoloski.name) becomes shared. I don’t need to monopolize the entire kocoloski.name domain, after all. I found a startup called FreeYourID.com that really seems to get this idea of a unified online identity. They have a streamlined process where you simultaneously receive
- an email address firstname@lastname.name
- the domain firstname.lastname.name
- an OpenID service residing at this web address
I went through the signup process Sunday, and it was all very organized and slick. In particular, the automatic OpenID account generation and association with my domain is something that would’ve required some extra reading on my part if I’d tried to do it manually. FreeYourID uses myOpenID for it’s OpenID services, which has a couple of neat features that you won’t see with the big providers, including the ability to generate a personal SSL certificate and thus skip out of password authentication once and for all. My only complaint is that their servers seemed a bit flaky and slow, with a couple of failed requests and a significant amount of time spent “Waiting for www.myopenid.com…” in Firefox. Hope it’s not a sign of things to come.
I haven’t quite made up my mind about the web portion of the FreeYourID package. At first glance it looks pretty cool:
- http://adam.kocoloski.name points to my current homepage.
- “Page Tags” are setup so that e.g. http://adam.kocoloski.name/photos always points to my photo-sharing site of choice.
- If I want more control, I can always specify my own nameservers and administer the domain myself.
The homepage forwarding and Page Tags are implemented using a) full-page framesets (the default) or b) redirects (presumably 302). I’m no web developer, but neither solution is really optimal from my standpoint as an end user. If I go with the framesets, people navigating my Flickr site won’t be able to see the real URLs in the title bar; it’ll always be stuck at adam.kocoloski.name/photos. On the other hand, if I use redirects, adam.kocoloski.name/photos only shows up for an instant and is replaced by my Flickr URL, which kind of defeats the purpose of the .name as my permanent online identity. It’d be wicked cool if things were set up so that for any part of my Flickr site I could just do s/flickr.com\/photos\/kocolosk/adam.kocoloski.name\/photos and get a link that works. I have no idea if that’s possible from a technical perspective.
Those minor quibbles aside, I definitely like what FreeYourID is doing. I’m only a couple of days into the 90 day free trial, but I could certainly see myself plunking down the $10.95/year for this setup afterwards.
