In just 10 mins you can change your ugly provider assigned OpenID URL from http://yourusername.pip.verisignlabs.com to yourwebsite.com

Before we get started

1. This tutorial assumes that you are already familiar with OpenID. If not http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_id

2. This tutorial also assumes that you already have an account with an OpenID provider.

If you DON’T, Get one, they’re FREE!! A list of public OpenID providers is available here.
My recommendation is MyOpenID

3. You will need to know your existing OpenID URL. Usually this is your username at your provider.

  • Examples of OpenID URLs assigned by Providers
  • http://username.myopenid.com/
  • http://claimid.com/username
  • http://username.pip.verisignlabs.com
  • http://openid.35.com/users/username
  • http://username.vox.com/

4. You will need to know your provider’s OpenID Server URL. You should be able to get this information from your provider. Usually this is your servers domain name followed by /server

  • Examples of OpenID Server URLs for major providers
  • LiveJournal http://www.livejournal.com/openid/server.bml
  • Vox http://www.vox.com/services/openid/server
  • VeriSign https://pip.verisignlabs.com/server
  • MyOpenID http://www.myopenid.com/server

Getting Started - The First and Only Step

To forward the authentication check from your blog/website to your openID provider we will be adding some link tags to your index page with specific rel attributes for Delegation.

From the OpenID wiki at http://wiki.openid.net/Delegation
Delegation allows you to use your own website as your identifier while still using a third-party OpenID provider.

Delegation de-centralizes the OpenID system. If you no longer trust say VeriSign you can delegate to MyOpenID as your identity provider just by editing two lines of HTML — your OpenID URL will always stay the same.

<link rel=”openid.server” href=”http://myprovider.com/openid/server” />

<link rel=”openid.delegate” href=”http://username.myprovider.com/” />

Add those two lines to the head of your blog/website homepage [usually index.html or index.php] and REPLACE the server with your server url and the username with your OpenID url.

Thats It! - you can now use just ‘yourwebsite.com’ as your OpenID url.