Are you a member of the 🕸️💍 IndieWeb Webring? Or have you wanted to be, but you couldn't sign in because it strictly required IndieAuth for sign-in?

I was recently gently reminded that the IndieWeb webring at one time allowed you to verify your identity using an alternative sign-in mechanism. For instance, by making bi-directional links between your home page and your GitHub account, you can delegate the step of "proving" that you are the person in control of your homepage to GitHub, and let them worry about storing and checking usernames and passwords.

This concept is called RelMeAuth (because it works by embedding links in your homepage let look like <a rel="me" ... >). The original version of the webring would first check to see if your site specifies its own IndieAuth provider and, if not, would fall back to using Aaron Parecki's indielogin.com, which handles checking for these rel="me" links to supported sites. It also supports sending codes to your email, if you prefer!

So it used to work?

Yeah! I, uh, broke it when I moved the site over to PHP some time ago.

But it works now?

It should! If your homepage has no IndieAuth server specified, but has rel="me" links to your GitHub or an email "mailto:" link, you should be able to sign in to the webring using those methods!

It was broken for how long?

😅 it was fixed within a day of someone telling me it was broken!

Please don't share any links to code-

Here are the updates I added today to enable indielogin.com support. Some of it is a little hacky until indielogin.com is updated to allow the full client_id URL for the webring, but it works OK!

Sigh, ok.

Okay that's it, for now! Thanks for reading, imaginary interlocutor! As always, feel free to reply to this post on your own site, or feel free to drop me a line in the #indieweb chat (I’m schmarty there)!