gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials » my open id http://www.ghacks.net A technology news blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Sat, 11 Feb 2012 09:52:46 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Log in to websites with your site’s URL as your OpenIDhttp://www.ghacks.net/2009/07/17/log-into-websites-with-your-sites-url-and-openid/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/07/17/log-into-websites-with-your-sites-url-and-openid/#comments Fri, 17 Jul 2009 11:12:56 +0000 Joe http://www.ghacks.net/?p=14457 OpenIDA few years ago, Martin covered OpenID, an open authentication system. Since then, it has become increasingly popular and a wide range of sites, from AOL to LiveJournal provide OpenIDs, and OpenID login is also quite common. OpenID is particularly popular for blog comments, with Blogger now integrating support for it.

An OpenID is an URL. However, using an URL like http://computerjoe.myopenid.com/ to log-in and post comments with just doesn’t look sophisticated. I much prefer to use my own blog’s URL to post comments and log-in; it pumps traffic to my blog and frankly just looks better.

Whilst you could run your own OpenID identity server to do this, this takes quite a bit of expertise to set-up and whilst it is probably more secure, it isn’t needed in my opinion.

It is possible to use a any identity server with your website’s URL. I personally use MyOpenID, but I log in to sites with joeanderson.co.uk/blog; not with computerjoe.myopenid.com.

This can be done by simply adding a few lines of HTML to your website’s <head>.

For example, I put

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

Naturally, these have to be modified depending on your username and server, but the provider should provider the information.

There are several benefits using this type of OpenID identificatin. The main one is that it just looks better but the most practical one is probably that it allows you to change provider whilst keeping the same log on. So, if I suddenly decide not to use MyOpenID, I can change to any other provider but my URL remains the same.

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/07/17/log-into-websites-with-your-sites-url-and-openid/feed/ 5 Avoid multiple login names with OpenIDhttp://www.ghacks.net/2007/05/30/avoid-multiple-login-names-with-openid/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/05/30/avoid-multiple-login-names-with-openid/#comments Wed, 30 May 2007 20:54:22 +0000 Tobey http://www.ghacks.net/2007/05/30/avoid-multiple-login-names-with-openid/ I really like the idea of an open and decentralized standard which allows you to sign in to multiple websites without entering your username and password over and over again on every site that requires you to login to vote (digg.com), comment, or participate in other means. There are so many sites where you have to login to use basically the same features that you used on another site just before you visited the new one.

Moreover, if you don’t use a very unique username, most likely you’ll sooner or later find out that your username has already been taken by someone else on a particular website. That forces you to choose another one and remember it or write it down. A good solution for storing such username password combinations for various services is KeePass but it doesn’t resolve the problem of multiple logins. The solution to this might be OpenID.

You simply create your openID account at one of openID providers (e.g. myOpenID ) and after that you can sign in to all OpenID enabled sites without having to re-enter login details on all of them.

You just provide your unique ID (username.openidprovider.tld) and that’s it. It could be especially useful if you don’t have the possibility to use features such as Opera’s Wand. One disadvantage is that the website must support it. However, the number of OpenID enabled sites is growing quite fast. Some of them are:

  • ImageShack
  • Technorati
  • Ma.gnolia
  • Crunchy
  • Rootly

Another disadvantage is that if someone steals your identity, he could gain access to all of your accounts on these websites. Does not make a difference for users who do use the same username and password on all sites though.

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