OpenId - is a one of the many global unique person identifier. The idea is not novel, but there are bunch of open-sourced, not vendor-dependent, collaborated implementations. Basically, the idea is in using your any well-known account, e.g. LiveJournal as a login or your ID in other systems. It is very useful, because you don’t need to create an account on another OpenID supported system, to make a simple action like leave a comment to a photo of your friend. As I run my own WordPress driven blog, I always wanted a some way to comment my friends posts on LiveJournal. But creating an account only for that reason, seemed to me meaningless. And at that moment appeared a genius and bright implementation of that unique id MyOpenId. Moreover, the LJ started to support this authentication method. For me only one inconvenience remained. I didn’t want sign my comments as jdev.myopenid.com (it is my MyOpenId account), because nobody knows who is behind this account. I needed a solution which allows me to associate my blog with my openId. Today I bumped into a great recipe in the How to Use Your Own URL, Not WordPress.com’s, As Your OpenID article.
Basically you need to do this few simple steps:

  • Get your MyOpenId.com account (or on any other OpenId provider)
  • Log in into your WordPress driven blog as admin
  • Go to Presentation -> Theme Editor -> Main Index Template
  • Add to head section of the index.php file such simple strings:
    <link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />
    <link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://yourAccount.myopenid.com/" />

Now, I can and do a LJ post comments of my friends :)