Replacing MyOpenID
In September Janrain announced that they were shutting down MyOpenID. Janrain was always one of the biggest OpenID proponents, so them calling it quits is quite significant. For me, this was definitely the last nail in the coffin. MyOpenID will go down February 1st, 2014.
Too bad really, because I really liked OpenID from a conceptual perspective, and this blog tells me I’ve been a fan since at least 2006. I predicted in 2009 (apparently) that it was already going down a route of over-engineering, even though the scope of the OpenID specifications was rather minimal compared to how things are looking right now.
At the moment you can’t even find the specifications on the OpenID website website without some intense searching, which is a stark contrast from for example OAuth.
What now?
Even though I wouldn’t recommend anyone building anything new with openid, there’s still a lot of sites that still use it for authentication. The biggest one I use on a daily basis being Stack Overflow.
MyOpenID provided a way to setup your own domain for authentication, so I used me.evertpot.com for a long time.
So I recently discovered IndieAuth, which is a cool authentication provider. IndieAuth supports OpenID since recently.
IndieAuth works by delegating authentication to a number of services they support, such as GitHub, Twitter and Google.
To set it up
On the domain you own, add the following meta tags:
<link rel="openid.server" href="https://indieauth.com/openid" />
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://evertpot.com/" />
Change my domain for your own ;).
Then somewhere on this page (http://evertpot.com/ in my case), you need to create links to the sites you want to use for authentication.
In my case I linked with Twitter and GitHub, so on my main page you’ll see the following links:
<a href="https://twitter.com/evertp" rel="me">@evertp</a></li>
<a href="https://github.com/evert" rel="me">evert</a></li>
The link to my profile and rel="me" is what’s important here. On both my
GitHub and Twitter accounts, I now need to create links back to
http://evertpot.com/. To do this, you simply need to make sure that these
respective profile pages link back to your homepage.
You can see this on my GitHub profile.
Then, head over to IndieAuth. Log in once using their form, and you’re off.
Easy, and you’re in control…
Some issues
IndieAuth can’t pick up my Twitter account for some reason. I assume that that’s a bug yet to fix.
Initially my website didnt have the <html></html> start and end tags. These
tags became optional in HTML5, but almost every OpenID consumer (such as
Stack Overflow) trips on that, as well as IndieAuth itself. So I begrudgingly
added them back.
Scanning for providers also fails with 500 Internal Server Error from time to time. Refreshing and trying again helps. One providers are discovered, this infromation is retained though.. so you likely only run into this the first time.
All of this together makes me feel that IndieAuth is still beta quality. The fact that the website comes out broken on Firefox on certain widths strongly underlines that.
But for now it solves my problem. Keeping control of my OpenID identity until nobody has even heard of OpenID anymore.
But I like OpenID!
Well next time we have an awesome open standard, lets not hand over control to a committee, shall we? Back when OpenID was part of LiveJournal, things we’re pretty awesome. For you youngsters, these were the same guys that gave us memcached and gearman.
I’m now placing all my bets on BrowserID a.k.a. Mozilla Persona.
Comments
5minpause •
Thank you for this tutorial. It worked splendidly.
@McGeekiest •
Thank you for this! Today, after finding that every third-party service I knew of had closed, that every Ruby gem was obsolete, that every PHP implementation was either nonfunctional or woefully incomplete, and after wrestling with the ludicrously arcane OpenID 2.0 spec for six hours to try to roll my own, I found this post. IndieAuth does exactly what I need it to, and I can now authenticate as my ManabaseCrafter site when I need to comment on OpenID-only sites.
Much appreciated.
JayB •
Gosh. It's a little extra tragic to come upon this article after the death of Persona. It was a great system, too.