OpenID
My OpenID is bengillies.net. It is hosted on my server, meaning that I own my own identity. OpenID is described as following:
OpenID eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites, simplifying your online experience.
You get to choose the OpenID Provider that best meets your needs and most importantly that you trust. At the same time, your OpenID can stay with you, no matter which Provider you move to. And best of all, the OpenID technology is not proprietary and is completely free.
If you want any more information, see http://openid.net/
OpenID eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites, simplifying your online experience.
You get to choose the OpenID Provider that best meets your needs and most importantly that you trust. At the same time, your OpenID can stay with you, no matter which Provider you move to. And best of all, the OpenID technology is not proprietary and is completely free.
If you want any more information, see http://openid.net/
Comments
A personal OpenID server
I've been looking at the TiddlyWeb log in system recently, specifically its support for OpenID, and my thinking went something like the following: "TiddlyWeb supports log in via OpenID (if you have one), and this is a blog that one person (that's me) needs to be able to log in to. What would be cool, would be if I could host my own OpenID server and use that to log into TiddlyWeb".
So after a bit of digging around, I came across a solution in the form of phpMyID which is an OpenID server serving one user only. First off, if you're not sure what OpenID is, the OpenID website describes it as follows:
OpenID eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites, simplifying your online experience.
You get to choose the OpenID Provider that best meets your needs and most importantly that you trust. At the same time, your OpenID can stay with you, no matter which Provider you move to. And best of all, the OpenID technology is not proprietary and is completely free.
All that looks very well and good so what's the downside you ask? Well unfortunately, support for OpenID isn't that great. A number of sites support it, but that support is hardly universal across the whole web.
Anyway, back to phpMyID. As the name suggests, it is written in php, so isn't really that compatible with TiddlyWeb (being written in Python), though being completely open, that doesn't really matter. The instructions on the site are fairly comprehensive, so to install it yourself, just follow them. As you do though, bear in mind the following points:
- You'll probably want to install the server in a separate folder. mine is at http://bengillies.net/openid or http://openid.bengillies.net
- If your setup is anything like mine, you will need to implement one of the options in the htaccess file in their subversion repository. The first one worked really well for me.
- You can test your installation at openidenabled.com by following the steps in the phpMyID forum.
<link href="http://openid.bengillies.net/" rel="openid.server"/>
<link href="http://openid.bengillies.net/" rel="openid.delegate"/>
<link href="http://openid.bengillies.net/" rel="openid.delegate"/>
Where http://openid.bengillies.net/ is the path to your OpenID Server (e.g. - MyID.config.php - read the install instructions, ad you'll know which file I mean).