Klaas Bals' Blog

Edit: Apparently a missing quote made half of the original post invisible to most users, making the post missing what I indended it to be. So I'm pinging this post again...

Many websites start to accept OpenID account, so it really starts making sence to create yourself an OpenID account, for example at myopenid.com. I did, so I now have http://kbals.myopenid.com as my OpenID account. However, when you do that, and start logging in everywhere with that specific account, you start to get dependent on myopenid.com. Very similar to using hotmail.com or gmail.com as your sole email address making you dependent on a specific provider, and you don't want that!

For an email address you can set up forwarding, for example in my case, all mail you send to klaas at bals dot be will be forwarded to my gmail account. For OpenID, this type of fowarding is calle OpenID Delegation. Make sure that before you start using OpenID, you set up OpenID delegation.

Actually this is very easy to do (if you already have a website or a blog) as explained in this post. For those of you that I have already converted to using drupal for your website, I'll even explain how to do that in drupal (informed by this explanation):

Create a block with input format 'php', place it somewhere in a region (like the header) and paste in the following content (of course adapted to your own openid account at myopenid.com that you created beforehand)

<?php
drupal_set_html_head('<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />');
drupal_set_html_head('<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://yourname.myopenid.com/" />');

// add the next two lines if your OpenID Provider supports OpenID 2.0
drupal_set_html_head('<link rel="openid2.provider" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />');
drupal_set_html_head('<link rel="openid2.local_id" href="http://yourname.myopenid.com/" />');
?>


From then on, you can login any site accepting openid accounts by filling in the name of you blog, http://bals.be in my case.

Oh yeah, once all of the Drupal modules I use are available in Drupal 6, I'll upgrade, and you'll be able to use your OpenID account on this site as well. (If you care. ;-)