pwnt.be

About a month ago, I started using OpenID and implemented it for authentication on this site. It’s currently used in the comment form, as well as to restrict access to my administration pages.

At the time, myOpenID’s trick that allows you to use your own domain seemed like a pretty neat feature. I assumed obscuring the myopenid.com domain from my OpenID would allow me to switch providers easily if I ever wanted to. While that was probably the case, if anything, the whole thing was confusing. The main problem was that I had not one but two OpenIDs:

• Firstly, timdp.myopenid.com was a dummy OpenID, just so I could use openid.pwnt.be as a sort of virtual provider.

• Secondly, that virtual provider contained openid.pwnt.be/tim, the OpenID I was actually using.

Obviously, the whole thing was a bit convoluted. Aside from having to alternate between the two whenever I had to use myOpenID’s account manager, there was the fact that the first one was sitting there doing nothing. While this technique can definitely be useful if more than one person is attached to a domain name, being the total loner that I am, I decided to go in a different direction.

So I read up on delegation, which turned out to be a lot nicer. Basically, after adding some HTML to this site, I can now use pwnt.be as an OpenID, which is just an alias for the existing timdp.myopenid.com. I got rid of the other one and I never need to mention that I’m using myOpenID, since the redirection is totally implicit.

Of course, if I’d bothered to do more reading, I could’ve figured that out straightaway, but you know how it is. I hope this post will keep others from making the same mistake I made.