This blog now functions as my ID. It is my delegate ID for OpenID. I got the idea for this from Sam Ruby‘s post “OpenID for non-SuperUsers“. As he states, you just have to add this to the head of the HTML for the blog:

<link href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" rel="openid.server" />
<link href="http://cubeinhabitant.myopenid.com/" rel="openid.delegate" />

My primary OpenID provider is myOpenID. They provide free OpenIDs. If you view the source of this blog, you will also find:

<meta http-equiv="X-XRDS-Location"
      content="http://www.myopenid.com/xrds?username=cubeinhabitant.myopenid.com" />

The form of this markup comes from the myOpenID information about “Using Your Own URL“.

As Sam states in his post, this allows me to use the URI “http://www.jpeterson.com/” as my OpenID identity. The myOpenID servers will actually provide the authentication. If for some reason, I need to change OpenID providers, I just need to update the delegate information in my blog and the identity provider will be changed. I don’t have to update all of the services that I registered my OpenID with. (That’s because I use “http://www.jpeterson.com/” instead of the URI for the OpenID provider when I register.)

Currently, our team at work uses Basecamp as a collaboration tool. Basecamp recently supported OpenID credentials. This was the impetus for me to set up my blog to be my OpenID URI. I have witnessed more adoption of OpenID lately. Hopefully this uptake will continue.

Tags: openid

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 20th, 2007 at 2:59 pm and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.