OpenID

I noticed that Yahoo recently started offering OpenID authentication as part of a Yahoo account, this means you can now use your Yahoo Id or Flickr account to authenticate for comments on this blog. Of course I had to install the wordpress openid plugin to make that work.

If you don’t know much about OpenId’s, you may want to read more about them on OpenID.net. A quick summary is that an OpenID allows you to log in to sites that support OpenID but having one username and password on a OpenID server. You just put the address of your OpenID (which can be your own website) and the other website asks your OpenID server whether you have logged in.

If you don’t want to use Yahoo’s OpenID, you can use any OpenID provider (which is the point of OpenID) such as Blogger,Wordpress or even build your own OpenID provider just for you.

I decided to build my own, mostly for curiousity. I used phpMyId, which is about the simplest php script to install. Drop the 2 files in the right place, edit the files to create the username/password (you may need access to a command line linux box for this) and then you can log in. If you want to make your website be the address for an OpenID, you need to add some html to the header of the index page (called delegating your OpenID) but this is included in the instructions for phpMyId.

Once you have an OpenId, you will probably want to test it.