I’m OpenID enabled. Check out the Wikipedia OpenID article for a great overview. The high points include:
When you post on a blog using OpenID, the blogger’s site asks your OpenID provider to log you in; when your provider verifies you, you are guaranteed a unique identity without maintaining an account for that blog.
On OpenID-enabled sites, Internet users do not need to register and manage a new account for every site before being granted access.
Sounds pretty good to me! Also, take a look at the Simon Willison Screencast on How to use OpenID.
The other thing I like about OpenID is that I can make my website/blog address be my OpenID. I.e., my OpenID is brianberliner.com. So, what do I get with this:
- An easy username to remember that works on multiple web sites.
- Muy OpenID maps to me, my brand.
- No need to create yet another password to forget (there’s only ONE PASSWORD) to manage.
- My very personal OpenID URI will only authenticate to me.
- I can change the back-end provider that does the actual authentication at any time, and the OpenID that the rest of the world sees does not change.
So, how did I do it?
1. Check out Simon Willison’s article on How to turn your blog into an OpenID.
I chose VeriSign Labs as my OpenID provider, since I trust the VeriSign brand. They are the one’s that will do the heavy lifting of securely authenticating me on multiple OpenID-enabled sites using my single sign-on password (yes, ONE PASSWORD!). I’m
brianberliner.pip.verisignlabs.com.
2. Configure your website/blog software to include two additional links in the header.
I edited my Wordpress 2.1 theme to add the following two lines to the <head> section:
<link rel="openid.server"
href="https://pip.verisignlabs.com/server">
<link rel="openid.delegate"
href="http://brianberliner.pip.verisignlabs.com/">
And, that’s it! Do these two steps and you too can be OpenID enabled.
