The importance of identity

Take a look at the picture below. To me it's a nice image because it shows that other people have visited the site and made their own composite segments.

Hey! There's even a composite segment in the distant and exotic town of Trondheim! This thing is going viral!

But the image illustrates something else as well, and that is that currently it is not possible to alter or remove composite segments. Looks like the person who made "Trondheims Klatrekonge" started making the composite and then made the "grave" mistake of saving the composite without realizing that this action persists the composite and that it is now not possible to change it.

Of course, this is not what I want; I want people to be able to create, maintain and even delete the composites that they themselves have created. But a prerequisite for this is that Composeg needs to know who you are: we need to authenticate users.

I'm having a lot of fun developing this site, and I have a lot of ideas for features/improvements, but most of these don't make much sense until I know who the users are. So, developing some sort of authentication mechanism for the site is pretty high on my list of priorities. The general plan is to maintain a site where anonymous users are welcome to browse and have a look at the contents, but where you have to be authentiated in order to create or change data.

So, I have to decide on the mechanism. The easiest for me would be to roll my own username/password based authetication solution (because I've done it before), but I'm not sure if it's wise to force the users to remember yet another username/password combination. So, I'll probably go with OAuth, which will be a new development experience for me.

This means that you will be able to authenticate via your google-, twitter-, linked-in- or facebook account. Currently, I don't even know if it will be easy to integrate with all of these, or if I'll have to settle for one or two. We'll see.