Migrating myopenid to google¶

Tags: python

I use openID on some sites for logging in (most notably the http://stackoverflow.com sites). I set up a myopenid account a long time ago. But I didn’t want to have http://reinout.myopenid.com/ as my ID as that’s a URL that’s not under my control. What if myopenid gets cancelled? It is a free service.

Luckily the openID protocol allows you to “redirect”. An ID is a URL. And if you put a couple of link tags in your preferred URL’s html <head> element you can use that URL as your openID.

So I used http://reinout.vanrees.org/ as my openID url. I had the following in my header:

<link rel="openid.server"
      href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />
<link rel="openid.delegate"
      href="http://reinout.myopenid.com" />
<link rel="openid2.local_id"
      href="http://reinout.myopenid.com" />
<link rel="openid2.provider"
      href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />
<meta http-equiv="X-XRDS-Location"
      content="http://www.myopenid.com/xrds?username=reinout.myopenid.com"
      />

Not totally sure if everything was needed, though. A bit of a mix between openID 1 and 2.

Yesterday I got an email that myopenid is stopping in a few months. Ah, so I have to move. The one that seemed handiest to me was to use my google account. The magic incantation could be found on stackoverflow. So I changed the stuff in my homepage’s <head> to this:

<link rel="openid2.provider"
      href="https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/ud?source=profiles" />
<link rel="openid2.local_id"
      href="https://profiles.google.com/reinoutvanrees" />

Tadaah! I can still log in with my same http://reinout.vanrees.org/ openID url. Hurray for building ID delegation into the protocol!

(And a solid pat on the back for myself for setting it up with delegation in the first place, of course) :-)

About me

My name is Reinout van Rees and I work a lot with Python (programming language) and Django (website framework). I live in The Netherlands and I'm happily married to Annie van Rees-Kooiman.

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