Tõnu Runnel

A fresh way to log in April 10, 2008

Instead of creating a login screen as a big empty canvas with a handful of boxes in the center of it, we found a more attractive way to authenticate users in Edicy. Basically, for logging in you only need those boxes – one for your mail address and another for the password to identify you. Then a checkbox to remember your face, a button for maintaining friendship with the oldschool where’s-my-submit-button-users and, of course the “i remember nothing” link for resetting one’s password.

We actually don’t need the canvas around it. You should be able to log in without loading a new screen, everything could be happening on top of the current page. That’s the way how we see Edicy – a seamless experience. No need to drag you away, from where you are, into an alien screen. Just log in wherever you are and land on your site in editing mode without an unneccessary step (a blank login screen) inbetween.

On the bottom of the sites, we provide a small Edicy logo, which works as a login button / bookmarklet. Just drag it to your bookmarks bar and click it whenever you feel the urge to do a little website editing. It works wherever you are – even on the Google’s homepage.

So. Simplest usecase would be something like this. You are “standing” on your contacts page and notice an error in the phone number. Just click on the bookmarklet, log in and correct the error. The only action is the change of mode from browsing to editing. If you click on the bookmark while being on another website, you’ll be directed to the page you edited latest.

And now some wild ideas. This feature might lead us to some very intriguing solutions soon. For example, a webaddict of an Edicy user could use this tool for keeping notes. Select a block of text on whatever site you currently are, click the bookmarklet and the text is saved in your scrapbook in Edicy’s account with all the meta info by just a couple of clicks. Or even publish it directly to your blog without actually leaving the page you are browsing. Similar to Google Notebook and such but connected to something much more practical – your website. And – as you can stay logged in – it wouldn’t even take more time than a blink of an eye. But hey – stop! That was just a wild idea from the labs. Even though the concept is proven – we didn’t say it’s even in the development (: