In an ideal world, some or all of the sites with large user databases (Yahoo!, AOL, Google, Amazon and so on) would act as OpenID providers, allowing their users to sign in to OpenID supporting sites around the Web. Until that happens, people who want to use OpenID need to sign up for Yet Another Account to do so.idproxy.net, launched today, is my attempt at speeding up the process. It uses Yahoo!’s Browser-Based Authentication API to allow you to sign in with a Yahoo! account, then lets you create one or more OpenIDs (of the form something.idproxy.net) to use with sites that support the OpenID standard.
In effect, it lets you use your Yahoo! account as an OpenID.
Source: idproxy.net: Use your Yahoo! account as an OpenID
Okay, I got distracted again. This time it was OpenID. It did not take me too long to setup an Open ID using my Yahoo! account and figure out how to authorize logins. It took me a little longer to figure out why I may want to use Open ID.
The primary advantage of using Open ID is with posting comments on other people’s web sites who require that you prove your identity before you make a comment. This can get pretty cumbersome to manage if you have a lot of sites that require you to setup a userid and password. For me Open ID is marginally useful but it is an interesting step in the right direction of managing your online identity.
For kicks I decided to try out the latest version of the WordPress OpenID plugin. It kind of works. The problems I have noticed so far are:
- I cannot login using OpenID my test blog(localhost/blog) running under XAMPP. I get a OpenID Authentication Failed: Bad signature.
- I had to add a slash to the url in the Trust root option.
- The login form is messed up on the remote server. It has “WordPress User:” and “Open Identity:” in a large font(i.e. Heading 2) with two boxes in which you can enter the OpenID. Only the second box works. I am running PHP version 4.4.4 on this server and GMP is not compiled into PHP. The login screen looked fine on my local test blog.
- There is a little funkiness with the first login to a WordPress site using OpenID.
- First you login into WordPress using your OpenID.
- Most of the time you will get an authenticate screen from idproxy.net for you to approve. If you do not get an approval screen(e.g. IE), you should open a new window and login to idproxy.net and see if you have any approvals waiting for you.
- Once you authenticate your access, you get a WP login screen where you need to enter the OpenID a second time. It doesn’t tell you why you are getting this screen but I think this is when your userid is created in WordPress.
- You should now be logged into WordPress. You should go to profile and modify the default geeky settings to something a little more descriptive and human-like.
- Once you have a userid created in WordPress subsequent logins should go smoothly.
- The OpenID plugin status information box will autoexpand when you move the mouse over it to show the details about the plugin on the remote server while it does not autoexpand on the local server.
Depending on your version of PHP and whether the GMP and BCMath libraries, this plugin works differently but it does work. Since OpenID probably has value, my solution to the login form problem was to hack the user-interface.php file and comment out lines 107-114. I am not sure what the code thought it should be doing at that point but I know the form works as designed without that code messing it up.