In one of my previous post, I explained about the rise of OpenID movement & how it is moving towards becoming a De facto standard in the online Digital Identity field. If you are still not aware of OpenID, you can consider reading my earlier post to get some gyaan on OpenID before continuing with this post. Today, I like to throw more light on OpenID by explaining how one can use his own website/blog/domain URL as an OpenID. This feature comes in handy when you have your own domain and/or if you don’t like to trust any of the OpenID providers in the market.
One can seamlessly start using their own site URL as OpenID by employing one of the following 2 methods.
1) OpenID delegation
OpenID delegation mechanism decouples your OpenID from any of the providers. In the recent times, the OpenID delegation mechanism has become quite popular among the OpenID enthusiasts. This can be achieved using the below steps.
- Get an OpenID by registering with an OpenID provider
Any of the popular OpenID providers like MyOpenID, MyId.net, claimID, myVidoop or VeriSign’s PIP can be used to register for an OpenID. In case, if you are using services like Blogger, wordpress.com or AOL you can safely skip this step as you will be already having an OpenID. For example, an OpenID registered with MyOpenID will be having a URL in the format http://username.myopenid.com.
- Map your site with OpenID
The next step is to map the OpenID to your domain URL. This can be done by including the following lines of code in the <head> section of your site/blog.
<link rel=”openid.server” href=”http://www.myopenid.com/server” />
<link rel=”openid.delegate” href=”http://username.myopenid.com/” />
<meta http-equiv=”X-XRDS-Location” content=”http://www.myopenid.com/xrds?username=username.myopenid.com” />
Where,
‘openid.server’ is the path to the OpenID provider’s server &
‘openid.delegate’ is the URL of your existing OpenID
Once you are done with these two steps, you should be able to log in to any of the OpenID enabled services using your site URL.
2) WordPress OpenID plugin
If you have a self hosted WordPress blog, then you can directly make use of the WordPress OpenID plugin. The OpenID plugin can act as both the provider as well as the consumer. That means, apart from adding OpenID support for your blog URL, it also enables the users to comment on your posts using their OpenID. The OpenID plugin requires XRDS-Simple plugin as a prerequisite to perform some of its functions. So, be sure to install & activate XRDS plugin before starting your play with OpenID plugin.
