You might have heard of something called an “OpenID”, and maybe you’ve seen the special OpenID login field on sites like PBWiki. Have you ever wondered what OpenID is, how it works, and how you can make use of it?
Simply speaking, OpenID is like a personal skeleton key for websites. You sign up for a single account at an OpenID provider (like MyOpenID.com), configure your profile, and then use that OpenID to log in to other sites. When you do that, the site you’re logging in to checks with your OpenID provider for authorisation, instead of asking for your username and password each time.
Apart from saving time, it also allows you to make use of an ever-increasing number of services without going through the schlep of having to register new accounts, remembering new passwords and/or activatiing new subscriptions. OpenID replaces that with a one-click process.
The point of this post:
But that’s not the point of this post. The point here is to show you how to use OpenID with your own domain. Instead of logging in to a OpenID site with a URL like:
http://woganmay.myopenid.com
… you could simply use your primary domain, eg:
woganmay.com
Getting this done is dead simple. Once you have a MyOpenId.com account, open up the index file for your primary domain (WordPress users: the header.php file for your active theme), and paste in two lines of code within the <head> section:
<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server">
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://[Your MyOpenID Username].myopenid.com/”>
The first tag tells incoming OpenID authentication requests to go the specified server. The second line tells it which account to request authorisation for. And just like that, you’re using OpenID with your own domain name :) (except if you have wp-cache, in which case you’re probably gonna have to rebuild).
