Delegating your OpenID

It’s possible to delegate your OpenID to another identity URL. In my case I delegated my OpenID http://id.masuran.org to http://blog.masuran.org.

The biggest benefit you get when delegating your OpenID is that you are independent from any OpenID provider. Let’s say you don’t host your own OpenID identity and that in a couple of years you become unhappy with how your OpenID provider. If you delegated your OpenID to your weblog and used http://www.myblog.com as OpenID, you can easily change OpenID providers and modify your weblog code. You can keep on using http://www.myblog.com as your OpenID even though you have changed your provider.

In this article I’ll first show you have to setup OpenID delegation when using phpMyID and then how to do it using other OpenID Identity Providers (OIP’s).

Ok, first case scenario. You’re hosting your own OpenID software, in this I’m using phpMyID. First we have to head over to our OpenID page and open the page source. You’ll see these link tags:

<link rel=”openid.server” href=”http://id.masuran.org/” />
<link rel=”openid.delegate” href=”http://id.masuran.org” />

at the top of the page source. These links show you your OpenID server address.

Now open up the page that you want to make a delegate and copy paste the link tags in the header section. In my case I changed my Wordpress theme header to include these tags.

It’s pretty important that you enter the correct tags, at first I entered them manually into the header section but forgot the trailing ‘/’ for the openid.server attribute. This caused the authentication to fail, so apparently the attributes are very sensitive about the value they contain. I found that the easiest way to get the correct ones is to look at your phpMyID page.

If you’re using an OpenID provider like myOpenID, the process is the same but the server url is a bit different. If you head over to your myOpenID page for example, you’ll find a link tag like this:

<link rel=”openid.server” href=”http://www.myopenid.com/server” />

This is the main server link you have to copy over to the page you want to delegate your OpenID to. Your delegate link is the same link as your OpenID identity you got from your provider.

<link rel=”openid.delegate” href=”http://masuran.myopenid.com/” />

Adding these two lines to your target page should be enough to delegate your OpenID. If you want to check your delegation, head over to this OpenID checkup hosted by OpenIDEnabled.com.

You might also want to check out this OpenID Wiki article about Delegation.