So recently I’ve been looking into the benefits of OpenID. After doing the research, it seemed like a good idea. Why use various logins throughout the web. I can just use, and trust, one site with my password to log into many different places. If I lose trust in that site, I can move my OpenID to another provider.
The best part is that with just a little bit of code, such as:
link rel=”openid.server” href=”http://www.livejournal.com/openid/server.bml”
link rel=”openid.delegate” href=”http://yourblog.livejournal.com/”
On your personal blog, since you control the code, you can use your site’s address as a delegate to log into any OpenID enabled site via your OpenID.
So now I can log into an OpenID enabled site as http://chuckfrain.net and I get prompted to log in (if not already) to Livejournal and then asked to approve the site requesting information. Initally I hacked on the theme to include the links. Then it dawned on me that if the technique was blogged about late last year, WordPress was bound to have a plugin to do the heavy lifting. Turns out I was right, thanks to Eran Sandler for his delegate plugin. Fill in the boxes and you’re good to go. If your blog caches, you will have to (or wait for) that to clear before it works. You can then check your OpenID at Openidenabled.com.
This is really much easier that I just explained, but it’s a bit late. I do want to take a moment to thank Aq for putting the link to Simon Willison’s blog that really explains the topic well.