I’ve been visiting a lot of celebrity gossip blogs lately and once in a while I want to leave a comment. I am so sick and tired of creating new user names and passwords on new sites all the time, and I really don’t want to use my Facebook or Myspace logins for OpenID. I’ve known about OpenID for years and never really paid much attention to it, but I decided to do a little research today to see what I could come up with.
My first stop was chi.mp where I created an account, netHideaway.mp. Chi.mp will allow you to import your Facebook, Twitter and Flickr content. You can import your Facebook photo albums and chi.mp has a mini blog you can post to which has the option to add your post to to your Facebook or Twitter accounts. Chi.mp seems really cool but I already have too many irons in the fire and I don’t need another one.
I did some more research and found a great OpenID tutorial over at Simon Willison’s Weblog. I found out how to turn my website into my own OpenID in two easy steps:
1. Sign up with an OpenID provider
Some OpenID providers are LiveJournal, Vox, VeriSign Labs, MyOpenID, and chi.mp that I mentioned earlier. Other providers are listed at openid.net.
2. Point your website to your new OpenID
You do this by adding two simple lines of code into the <head> tag of the page you’ll be using. I chose MyOpenID as my provider and inserted the following code into the <head> tag of my website netHideaway.com:
<link rel=”openid.server” href=”http://www.myopenid.com/server”>
<link rel=”openid.delegate” href=”http://nethideaway.myopenid.com”>
To find out your server name just view the source page of your OpenId account. (In my case this is nethideaway.myopenid.com.)
Your delegate is the OpenID you received from your OpenID provider.
That’s all there is to it. Now I can log in as netHideaway on any web site where there is an option to use OpenID. If for any reason I decide I don’t trust my OpenID provider anymore I can always get a new one from a different provider and never have to change my login again. Yay!
If you need a more indepth explanation check out the OpenID tutorial I mentioned above.
