Floorplanner Tech Blog » openid http://techblog.floorplanner.com Just another WordPress weblog Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:00:57 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Using your own site as OpenID identity http://techblog.floorplanner.com/2008/12/18/using-your-own-site-as-openid-identity/ http://techblog.floorplanner.com/2008/12/18/using-your-own-site-as-openid-identity/#comments Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:33:27 +0000 Willem van Bergen http://techblog.floorplanner.com/?p=378

My personal domain vanbergen.org is almost 10 years old. Besides the accompanying e-mail address, I’ve never used it extensively, but its one of the oldest pieces of my “legacy” that can be found on the Internet and it is the starting point of my online identity.

Lately, major internet companies have embraced the OpenID standard to allow other sites to login with the login credentials of these major sites, basically running an OpenID server. (Curiously, they do not support consuming OpenIDs themselves, so I still have to trust them with my password. What’s up with that?) I can use most of the sites I have an account on as OpenID identity. For example, my Flickr page is an OpenID identity URL. With more and more sites supporting consuming OpenIDs (including Floorplanner!), I will not have to remember all those passwords and the internet will become a better place because of it.

It would be nice to use my 10 year old domain name as my OpenID identity. This is actually very easy because of delegation. I do not have to run my own OpenID server: I can just add a header to my site that points to the OpenID server that I will be using. I have chosen to use my Google Account as OpenID server. To accomplish this, I simply added the following tag to the <head>-section of the vanbergen.org site:

<link rel="openid2.provider" 
    href="https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/ud" />

Now, I can simply enter “vanbergen.org” when my OpenID identity URL is requested on a site. How neat is that? That site will check my personal site for this tag and will redirect me to the Google Account page, on which I can confirm that I want to login to that site. Note: the site has to support OpenID 2.0, because Google does not offer an OpenID 1.0 provider. Luckily, most sites do.

OpenID login on Floorplanner.com

I do not know what happens to the sites I have registered on with OpenID if I decide to change my OpenID provider and I change the value on vanbergen.org accordingly. Does anybody know if my existing OpenID accounts will keep working in this case?

]]> http://techblog.floorplanner.com/2008/12/18/using-your-own-site-as-openid-identity/feed/ 1