Thanks to the generous donations of some of our dedicated fans, I have been able to upgrade the service that provides our 3rd party user authentications to the “Plus” version for 1 year! Now, instead of only 6 limited services available for users to log in with for commenting and participation on the website, we have access to the full range of social networking sites and additional, expanded services until this time next year.

What does all this mean?

I’m so glad you asked! It means that as we ramp up to the new season of SouthLAnd, and especially this fall as the cast starts filming the new episodes and we (hopefully) start getting some inside news & pictures, virtually anyone on the internet from any social networking site around will be able to comment and participate here – without us worrying about being overrun by spammers!

So if you’ve ever thought that you might want to comment on an article or post here, but it was just too much trouble to create an account just to say “Hey, that’s cool!” that’s no longer a valid excuse. If you have an account with one of the following services, you can log in – securely – using your existing account. Because it is secure, using the oAuth protocol, you will never be asked to give us your username and password, nor do we have any access to it. It is, in fact, the industry standard method and we are using the industry leader to provide this service – only the best for our SouthLAnd fans!

The services that we can now authenticate with are:

• Facebook
• Google
• Yahoo
• AOL
• Windows Live ID/Hotmail
• Blogger
• flickr
• WordPress.com
• LiveJournal
• OpenID

In addition to the 10 above, if you already have a registered account on the site (which we always encourage for repeat visitors/contributors!) you can always access your Profile page and associate it with an account on one of those services plus Twitter or MySpace. Unfortunately, Twitter and MySpace do not provide email addresses on request as part of the “handshake”, so we cannot use them for first-time logins any more. Once you have an account here, though, you can use it for “easy login” access so you don’t have to keep re-entering your username and password again and again.

If you have an account with someone else not listed there, chances are pretty darned good that they support the last one on the list, OpenID, which is the Internet standard for cross-site authentication. But then again, if you are social networking and you don’t have an account with at least one of those sites, well … do I really need to say more?

So what are you waiting for, everyone? It’s time to jump in and start PARTICIPATING! No more excuses now.

Note: All service names are Trademarks, Registered Trademarks and/or Service marks of their respective owners. They are used here in accordance with all the appropriate API licensing terms.