befriend Webfinger
Please watch this short video to get an overview of Webfinger
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y26c9MNQLyc
If you have an Identi.ca account or a Google account you already have an email [like] address that you can webfinger.
- create an account with a service that provides Webfinger metadata
- look up your meta data at http://webfinger.org/
- explore the information that was discovered
When you do a webfinger discovery on an email [like] address at somebody@example.org the process begins by asking for the URL http://example.org/.well-known/host-meta which will given the caller back an LRDD document with some XML like the following
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<XRD xmlns="http://docs.oasis-open.org/ns/xri/xrd-1.0">
<hm:Host xmlns:hm="http://host-meta.net/xrd/1.0">example.org</hm:Host>
<Link rel="lrdd" template="http://example.org/main/xrd?uri={uri}">
<Title>Resource Descriptor</Title>
</Link>
</XRD>
Using your webfinger provider:
- from your browser download the host-meta file and examine the contents of the file. Locate the template tag . If you know your way around a terminal you could also .. curl http://example.org/.well-known/host-meta
- now look up the template URI switching {uri} for acct:somebody@example.org i.e here we would look up http://example.org/main/xrd?uri=acct:somebody@example.org, again examine the contents of this file, what information is stored here about you?
- You will probably see your OpenID provider listed here explore how Webfinger can enhance the capabilties of OpenID
For some more background you can read the following: