Jesse Peterson » openid

Successfully accessed Facebook with OpenID

cubeinhabitant — Sun, 24 May 2009 04:26:28 +0000

I have successfully accessed Facebook with my OpenID. I learned that Facebook was acting as an OpenID relying party, meaning Facebook will accept some other credentials than ones provided by Facebook to access your Facebook account. I discovered this capability when reading the post OpenID’s Tipping Point. It was very easy to set up. Here are the steps I went through in Facebook to link an account via OpenID:

Settings -> Linked Accounts -> Add a new linked account: -> OpenID…

I then entered my OpenID URL and clicked “Link New Account”.

Using OpenID to access Facebook is a little bit different than other apps that I have used to authenticate with OpenID. To use OpenID to authenticate to Facebook, you actually authenticate with your OpenID provider first before accessing Facebook. Then when you access Facebook, it recognizes the existing OpenID authenticated session and proceeds to take you to your Facebook “Home”.

This is a great enhancement to Facebook. It makes it much more convenient for me to access the application.

Authenticate via OpenID

cubeinhabitant — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 03:22:53 +0000

You can now use OpenID to authenticate at this blog! w00t!

I have just installed the Wordpress plugin OpenID (version 3.2.1). Installation was very simple: just upload the “openid” directory to the “plugin” directory and then active the plugin. The plugin allows you to assign multiple OpenIDs to your account to log in to your blog account.

Here is my ID

cubeinhabitant — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 20:59:04 +0000

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:

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

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.