January 18, 2008

Blogger Becomes an OpenID Provider

After allowing you to authenticate your comments using an OpenID, Blogger is now an OpenID provider. To use any of your blogs as an OpenID identity, you need to check "Enable OpenID for blogs" in your Blogger profile (the feature is still experimental, so it's not added in the public release yet) and save the settings.


Blogger inserts this line in the head section of your template:

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://draft.blogger.com/openid-server.g" />

so now you can use any of your blogs as an OpenID. Some simple things you can do with your OpenID are to claim your blog at Technorati (you still need a Technorati account), sign in using your OpenID at Plaxo, Zoomr or post comments in a LiveJournal blog, like Brad Fitzpatrick's blog. A small inconvenience is that Blogger uses the subdomain of your blog instead of your name.

Yesterday, Yahoo announced it will support OpenID 2.0 (Blogger is a provider for OpenID 1.1), so the future is bright for this authentication system.
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24 comments:

  1. AnonymousJanuary 18, 2008 at 3:54 AM

    This is interesting.

    However, with so many existing services moving to support OpenID, the original problem of having too many login accounts resurfaces - I have a LiveJournal, Yahoo and Blogger account, so I have more than enough OpenIDs to use. It would be great if there was some way to unify all these IDs, sort of a one ID to rule them all thing? Sounds a bit of a security risk, though.

    As it is though, I find the practical applications of OpenID still somewhat limited... It's great to be able to comment on other blogs/services without having to register, but that's about as much use as I see for it right now.

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  2. AnonymousJanuary 18, 2008 at 5:17 AM

    since Blogger can work with Google Accounts we may say that Google is an OpenID provider

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  3. AnonymousJanuary 18, 2008 at 5:26 AM

    but you need to be logged in blogspot, is not it?

    so it would be difficult to use simultaneously more that a blogspot openid.

    ReplyDelete
  4. ArmandJanuary 18, 2008 at 6:27 AM

    That's great but there are indeed many OpenID providers and yet very few sites that support OpenID for login.
    Blogger does both, so +1 for Google.

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousJanuary 18, 2008 at 6:31 AM

    lctkw , there's no overload - just more options. There's no need at all to utilize more than one OpenID (unless you want to) so you can just ignore the other providers.

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  6. AnonymousJanuary 18, 2008 at 6:01 PM

    Opino más o menos lo mismo que lctkw.

    [...]Vía | Google Operating System[...]

    ReplyDelete
  7. EverymatterJanuary 18, 2008 at 7:50 PM

    i think it will increase competition between yahoo and google

    ReplyDelete
  8. AnonymousJanuary 19, 2008 at 6:19 AM

    That's great! let's try how it works first of all writing a comment here.

    hehehehe

    ReplyDelete
  9. AnonymousJanuary 20, 2008 at 5:02 PM

    Great, but I want also a delegation function.

    ReplyDelete
  10. e_ApwnJanuary 22, 2008 at 6:58 AM

    What exactly is an Open ID Blogger and an open ID provider?
    thank you.
    I stumbled upon this page looking for details how to find or create themes and backgrounds for my personal blog...

    ReplyDelete
  11. jetxeeFebruary 7, 2008 at 1:47 AM

    Great!

    I tried it, and it works. No need to do OpenID delegation anymore.

    I have also translated this instructions into Russian:
    Использование «родного» OpenID в Blogger, без делегации.

    ReplyDelete
  12. AnonymousMarch 13, 2008 at 8:45 AM

    I'll test it here as well.

    ReplyDelete
  13. AnonymousApril 13, 2008 at 3:52 PM

    Cool

    ReplyDelete
  14. AnonymousFebruary 4, 2009 at 10:07 AM

    hello, i want to ask something...!!!

    in my edit profile there's no "enable openID for blog".
    can you tell me how it can happen.
    there just a new task "show my blog".

    ReplyDelete
  15. CathApril 13, 2009 at 4:28 PM

    Yes, this advice seems to have stopped working.

    ReplyDelete
  16. AnonymousApril 15, 2009 at 5:58 PM

    I'm trying to figure out if openid is working. There needs to be a place you can connect to get an unambiguous yes or no.

    ReplyDelete
  17. AnonymousMay 1, 2009 at 9:13 PM

    I love this except that I switched my blog to a subdomain on my site... now it simply shows up as "blog".

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  18. GaneshMay 13, 2009 at 9:29 AM

    In my site there is no option called enable open id for blogs....what should i do?

    ReplyDelete
  19. AnonymousMay 13, 2009 at 10:59 AM

    Go to "draft.blogger.com"

    ReplyDelete
  20. vbutoianuOctober 29, 2009 at 2:31 AM

    does Blogger Open is Support the extensions feature to retrieve the users' personal information: nickname, fullname, email, etc?

    ReplyDelete
  21. AnonymousDecember 6, 2009 at 12:47 PM

    It's a great feature, but there's one thing ruining the fun - the fact that you can't show a nickname over the URL. The way it is, a blog owner sees my comment and it seems spammy because it's signed with the URL instead of a name!

    ReplyDelete
  22. AnonymousApril 2, 2011 at 11:04 PM

    Really interesting article. But openid is all dead now.

    ReplyDelete
  23. LeoNerdApril 21, 2011 at 4:14 AM

    Does anyone know if this feature still works? I've tried using it just now and I don't appear to have the named option any more.

    ReplyDelete
  24. baotriFebruary 21, 2012 at 11:08 PM

    An advantage of having an openid on your own domain is that it’s exchangeable as well – if a openid provider goes out of business you can just delegate to a new one and have a fallback even on sites that doesn’t allow multiple openid:s.

    Although – that would be the drawback as well – if your site got hacked and the front page replaced then the hacker can also hijack your openid – so you need to be sure to have a secure website :)

    ReplyDelete

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