Putting TimeCert in your blog

A day or two ago I silently released a new update to TimeCert. It features amongst other things a new javascript that you can use in your own blog or other application by modifying your template.

TimeCert is a simple service to prove the existence of something at a certain time. Many writers, inventors and musicians have traditionally sent themselves sealed envelopes of their work so the postal mark provides a third party time stamp of their work incase of future dispute. TimeCert is just like this. Rather than send a sealed envelope you calculate a digest or fingerprint of what it is you want timestamped and send it to TimeCert. TimeCert will tell you the first time it was presented said digest.

These digests are pretty easy to calculate in server side languages such as Ruby, PHP and Java. You just calculate it and make a request to the server with it such as:

http://timecert.org/a94a8fe5ccb19ba61c4c0873d391e987982fbbd3

I provide a bunch of both human and machine readable formats, to make it as easy as possible to link it into your application.

What about blogs and other application where you might not be in control of the source control?

Now there is a fairly simple way of integrating TimeCert into your blog using javascript. This means you just have to modify your template 2 or 3 places to use it.

You basically load the timecert javascript and call a function on a element within your html page. This calculates the digest on the fly in the browser and inserts a TimeCert link in the page. For full instructions see the TimeCert home page

I have to say though that there will be problems with Typo based blogs like this one as it dynamically modifies the timestamp of the blog entry. But I’ve been testing it for a while on my blog Neubia and it seems to work fine.