Life is grand

Sun has started providing OpenID to its employees which in a wonderfully webish way gives some measure of accountability.

My one problem with the idea though is the potential of Sun employees now having two OpenID URLs. They may have one through a free and public provider like MyOpenID and now are been given one through Sun. Does OpenID or Sun’s implementation of it provide a redirect for this situation? I use paulmwatson.com as my OpenID but it is simply a redirect to MyOpenID. Hopefully Sun’s implementation is setup to allow a similar process.

There has been plenty of buzz lately about OpenID. I think the idea is very good even though its flexibility (”decentralised”) can make getting your head around it a bit difficult. Once you figure it out though you realise how obvious it is.

Up till now though my main problem with OpenID has been getting my domain, paulmwatson.com, to be my OpenID. I want to login to your system with paulmwatson.com as my ID, username, etc. I once tried to install the server software but that went nowhere and I left it.

Thankfully Simon Willison wrote How to turn your blog into an OpenID which uses a simple (for us techies) meta tag in your HTML to redirect through to an OpenID provider. So I signed up with MyOpenID which is my identity provider but I tell OpenID accepting sites to use paulmwatson.com which routes through to MyOpenID. As Simon points out if I stop trusting MyOpenID or find a better provider all I have to do is change the meta tags and all my dependant services carry on working using paulmwatson.com.

Very nice. Thanks Simon, and thanks for OpenID.