Some of you may remember my post a few months ago about setting up an OpenId server on my site. Well, things haven’t been too rosy since then. I’ve since had to kill my old OpenId server and find a replacement. Fortunately the story has a happy ending.
I give up on phpMyID
After not being able to log into countless sites, I decided to call it quits with phpMyID. While it is a very easy program to setup, it doesn’t work with half the OpenId enabled sites out there. I don’t care how simple your program is, if it doesn’t work I don’t want to use it. I waited a few months to see if the bug would get fixed, but nothing has changed since January. Sorry phpMyID, things just didn’t work out, you are now dead.
A much easier way to OpenId
After looking around at the other OpenId libraries available, I came to the conclusion that I’d have to find a completely different solution. All of the libraries were either out-dated, too immature, or too bloated for my taste. Then I found out about OpenId delegates and all my problems were solved.
Basically a delegate is a third party OpenId server that you use to authenticate yourself on your site. Setting it up on your site requires two very simple steps. First, create an account on an OpenId authentication site. I used claimID, but there are lots of sites out there, some you may already have an account on. The next step is to add the following chunk of code to the header of your website. Obviously you’ll need to change the values to match your account, but hopefully you get the idea.
<link rel="openid.server" href="http://openid.claimid.com/server" /> <link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://openid.claimid.com/mattc" />
It is dead simple and saves you the hassle of having to set up and maintain a server on your site. Also, if for any reason you want or need to switch to a different third party authenticator, all you have to do is change the href value in the above html. All of the benefits of OpenId without any of the hassle.
I’m loving OpenId more and more everyday!