I’ve been recently toying with OpenID stuff, and found that it is far more useful than it seems at first glance. What’s not apparent is that if you have a website, you can configure things to use its URL as your OpenID even if you’re using AOL/LiveJournal/MyOpenID.net/etc for your OpenID authentication. This allows you to re-configure it at a later date using any service you’d like, without having to change your OpenID sign-in info. It doesn’t get much more “open” than that.

It’s kind of complicated, and it requires a fair bit of reasearch to find the info you need to make it work, so people who are aware of this functionality probably don’t care enough to do the work. It’s with that in mind that I’ve done the research and created a little configurator-thingy to make it as easy as possible for anyone hosting a website to set this up.

Introducing MOREopenID.org. One selection and two input boxes gets you one file to upload to your server and a short block of tags to paste into your website’s head section, putting you in complete control of your OpenID identity forever. If you decide to change OpenID providers at some point, simply come back and do the steps again.

Things are still pretty rough at this stage, so I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t social-network it to death (yet) or anything, but I’d be much obliged if you’d try it out and give me feedback on what I should do to make it better—and especially so if you have any problems. If any part of it at all is confusing, I would like to hear about it.

Thanks a ton.

Defined tags for this entry: geeky, howto, openid, openid configuration, openid delegation