Why OpenID is Awesome and You Should Use It
This is an OpenID tutorial for anyone who ever wondered what in the hell the fuss was about. Guys! Guys! OpenID is REALLY AWESOME. Let me show you!
I am a livejournal user, which I'm afraid has made me a bit of a pariah in the book community (re: blogspot). Dewey says I am imagining things, but am convinced that LJ's exclusive commenting system is to blame for them. Probably to a lot of people, I'm simply unreachable because they don't have LJ accounts with which to interact with me. I always knew when Blogger caught up with the rest of the internet, all the walls between the LJ and blogspot community could (and should) fall down. But OpenID is still pretty unfriendly. So therefore, here I am!
I use OpenID to comment on the journals that allow it (like Blogger) instead of using my blogger ID, which only takes people to my blogger profile. I'd rather them come directly to me, right? Also, unless people have an LJ account, the only way they can comment is anonymously. Even with an account, the same problem: it just takes me to their unused LJ instead of their actual journal. Also, LJ makes anonymous commenting a bitch.
OpenID solves this, blogspot community! We can be pals!
OpenID as a concept I have trouble explaining because I am not as smart as the people who came up with it. I will now steal from Wikipedia:
OpenID is a shared identity service, which allows internet users to log on to many different web sites using a single digital identity, eliminating the need for a different user name and password for each site. OpenID is a decentralized, free and open standard that lets users control the amount of personal information they provide.
Interested in commenting on LJ blogs and even other blogspot blogs with your OpenID (that will link to your actual blog and not your profile)? Excellent! Let's get started:
Step #1:
Check out http://openid.net/get/ and look at the various services that automatically give you an OpenID identity. Most likely, you use one of them already (for instance, I use livejournal). If this is the case, your work is done. When a journal or location allows you to use OpenID, you simply type in username.service.com. For me to use OpenID, I simply type in, bottle-of-shine.livejournal.com. If I wanted to use my blogger account, I could: bottleofshine.blogspot.com.
Therefore, if you have an account at any of the services listed on http://openid.net/get/, you're done. Sweet!
Step #2:
If you don't have an account at one of these services because you have your own domain, you can claim your account by using a service (you can also install your own but screw that noise, I am PROGRAMMING DUMB). I use claimID (because it was first on the list). It's never broken my heart! You create an account there (and they do give you some neat stuff) and they'll provide you some code. Two lines of it! If you use claimID (I assume other services would be similar), it will look like this:
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://openid.claimid.com/yourusername" />
That goes in your head section of your header file of whatever blogging software you're using, such as Wordpress. Just find your <head> tag and put it somewhere after. It can also be used for websites, like, for instances, I can use it for this site, echthroi.org/getliterate. Just paste the code like this:
Save that file. Ta-da! You have now claimed your URL. You can go somewhere that allows OpenID service and type in your URL (you can normally leave off the "http://www" part). You're officially using OpenID!
Step #3:
Using OpenID sometimes adds more steps to commenting as you get validated through your service, such as this:
You can trust sites you use OpenID at often, and skip these the next time you comment, or you can say, "NO, I only want to trust this site THIS TIME! Never know when someone's going to turn shady!".
When I use Blogger and claimID together, I get an interesting prompt that will ask me for my nickname and then in the comments, my nickname appears instead of my URL. That's pretty cool!
Step #4:
Here are more examples of how this process looks using LJ and blogger both.
Cool Stuff You Can Do At LJ
Because I use LJ, I discovered a lot of cool things that OpenID does in an LJ context. When you use OpenID with LJ, you'll notice you can click "log in" and you can also log in to LJ with your identity here. This will give you limited rights as an LJ user. Here are the benefits of using OpenID to comment at LJ, instead of commenting anonymously:
1. I am uncertain her permanant is it, but you can actually upload an icon to represent you. Your icon will appear with comments you make. It says six, but I believe it's really just one. More research is needed to see if it actually sticks.
2. You can have a limited profile.
3. You can vote in polls! Polls are AWESOME. :D
4. You can add people to your friends list, so if there are a lot of people or communities your follow on LJ, you can just friend them and use your LJ friends list to follow them. The LJ friends list is similar to Google Reader, except just with LJ journals.
And that's that! I hope this was a helpful introduction to OpenID. It's still a very new idea, and has some kinks to be worked out in the user friendliness department, but maybe this tutorial clears up why OpenID is so beneficial, especially when places like LJ offer little perks to go along with using it. I'm sure in the future many sites will adopt it and it will be more mainstream and have way more features, so there's no place to go but up. Hopefully you will give it a try! Good luck!
Disclaimer: I am not versed in OpenID beyond knowing how I got it to work for me. Some of this might not work for you, but don't give up! Google is your friend. :D
