pwnt.be

This site is now OpenID-enabled—yeah, it was about time, right?

For those of you who have lives: OpenID is a decentralized single sign-on service, meaning you register once at a provider of your choice, and use that account at any site that supports OpenID. It’s secure and deployed by various industry leaders.

So if you have an OpenID, you should be able to use it when you post a comment. Until I streamline the process, just be sure to log in before you start entering your comment. Once you’ve authenticated, you should also see a nifty OpenID logo in the top right corner.

I use myOpenID as my OpenID provider. They allow you to use your own domain name, so I’ve got openid.pwnt.be set up as an OpenID provider now, with openid.pwnt.be/tim as the only configured ID. If you’re planning on signing up for an OpenID yourself and you’d rather have it at openid.pwnt.be/yourname than yourname.myopenid.com or whatever, drop me a line and I’ll set it up for you.

Now for some ultra dull technical details. You never know who they might be of interest to. Probably not you though.

My PHP-based OpenID consumer is based on Zend_OpenId, which I had working in no time. I also looked at OpenID for PHP, but I couldn’t keep that from throwing a ton of errors. While it sure seems a lot more versatile than Zend_OpenId, I like to keep it simple.

At first, I couldn’t get Zend_OpenId working on DreamHost’s servers, as their PHP is built without both GMP and BC Math, either of which can take care of the encryption arithmetic. Luckily, they allow you to compile your own PHP, which is pretty cool. Nevertheless, there are suggestions in the DreamHost Web Panel asking for those features, so if you’re a fellow DreamHoster, please vote them up.