Blog URI, is it necessary?

[Martin Atkins]

Brad Fitzpatrick wrote:
> On Fri, 20 May 2005, Martin Atkins wrote:
> 
> 
>>LiveJournal can't redirect www.livejournal.com/users/brad/ to
>>brad.livejournal.com because it can't distinguish between an OpenID
>>consumer and a regular pageview.
>>
>>However, since I made that post earlier today about canonical IDs I've
>>come around to thinking it's a bad idea. It should be the Identity URL's
>>responsiblility to canonicalize, since otherwise all of the identity
>>servers will canonicalize in different ways.
>>
>>I guess LiveJournal users just get three different identities.
> 
> 
> Which is why we've never been able to force them all to redirect to one of
> the three... every URL form has its own vocal support group.  What we may
> do is make every user have to choose which they use, and then redirect the
> other two.  But from page to page, a LJ user always has their preferred
> form, so they're not going to randomly pick one each time.
> 

If a paid account user picks the user.livejournal.com form and later 
becomes a free account user, the only way that identity can go on 
working is if the user.livejournal.com URL (which now just points at an 
error message) becomes the primary form.

I think you're right that users will just pick one and stick with it. 
However, there are probably going to be free users who are savvy enough 
to realise that the ID is a URL but don't realise that the error message 
will work for them as an identity. They might realise that later, but by 
then it's too late to switch without breaking all of the existing 
trust/login/whatever records their old ID belongs to.

Just a matter of making sure users realise how it works, I guess.