Be Your Own OpenID Provider

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:35:00 GMT

As more and more sites and services start offering OpenID for authentication, you may decide that it would be better to go it alone and be your own OpenID provider (instead of going with one of the other hundreds of providers).

phpMyID uses two PHP files that allow website owners to use their domain name for authentication to OpenID-supporting sites. Just download the archive from the sites, upload the files, configure and place a few HTML tags in your index page, and you will be able to use your website as your personal OpenID URL when logging in to OpenID sites.

For those unfamiliar with OpenID, it is "an open, decentralized, free frameworkd for user-centric digital identity." In layman's terms, OpenID is a way to authenticate/prove that it is actually you that is logging in to a service. Instead of providing a username/password combo, all you'll need to enter is a URL. When you do, you're directed to your identity provider (in this case, your own URL) to log in. When you are authenticated, you go back to the site you were trying to get into, and you're off and running.

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Be Your Own OpenID Provider