I’ve recently added OpenID support to my WordPress installations via a plugin. This allows anyone with an OpenID to log in and set up a profile using an existing provider such as Google,Yahoo etc rather than having to remember yet another username/password combination.
However the one problem I have had using OpenID is that I settled on Google as my provider (mainly because I use it all the time and therefore remember the credentials!) which works fine but required me to remember and type the rather lengthy domain that points to my Google profile. This also means that things show up as Google instead of one of my own domains. It would be nice I thought to be able to register/log in to sites that support OpenID with my own domain name(s) instead. Not just because it is less to type but also because it identifies me slightly better.
Luckily it is a very basic process to set this up. Using Google requires slightly amended syntax from some other providers but the concept is the same,namely that you need to add a couple of LINK REL tags into the HEAD section of a html file on the domain you want to use. In order to get Google to act as the delegated provider you need to add the following into a page on your domain,I had the best results putting it in my index.html file at the root of the hosting folder. If you haven’t already it may be worth checking the settings of your Google profile and setting it to something easy to type rather than the default long number.
<link rel=”openid2.provider”href=”https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/ud?source=profiles”/>
<link rel=”openid2.local_id”href=”http://www.google.com/profiles/[PROFILE NAME]”/>
And that’s it. Once you’ve done that you can now use your domain name as an OpenID,so in my case I can just use keavey.net (or keavey.com as they both point to the same place) as my OpenID. This will delegate to Google for confirmation when you first use a site in this way and that’s it.
