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.

24 comments:

  1. 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.

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

    ReplyDelete
  3. 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. 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. 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.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Opino más o menos lo mismo que lctkw.

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

    ReplyDelete
  7. i think it will increase competition between yahoo and google

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

    hehehehe

    ReplyDelete
  9. Great, but I want also a delegation function.

    ReplyDelete
  10. 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. 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. I'll test it here as well.

    ReplyDelete
  13. 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
  14. Yes, this advice seems to have stopped working.

    ReplyDelete
  15. 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
  16. I love this except that I switched my blog to a subdomain on my site... now it simply shows up as "blog".

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

    ReplyDelete
  18. Go to "draft.blogger.com"

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

    ReplyDelete
  20. 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
  21. Really interesting article. But openid is all dead now.

    ReplyDelete
  22. 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
  23. 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

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.