Tim Almond

I decided to finally get round to checking out Jeff Attwood and Joel Spolsky’s new project, Stack Overflow, which is like a programmer Q&A forum.

The way to log in to Stack Overflow is using something called Open ID. The general idea is that rather than having dozens of different logins for dozens of different sites, you can have a single login for all of them. The way it works is that your login is in the format of a full URL, and when you enter it, a site will redirect to the URL of your login, you enter your details and you are authenticated back on the site you were at. It also means that you can hold certain login details, like your name, DOB and allow sites to get that information rather than having to input it multiple times.

The beauty of openid is that it doesn’t rely on a single authority. There are a number of major sites where you can sign up for an open ID, but you can also even manage your own OpenID server.

I thought I’d try the option of being king of my own authentication, so I set up a subdomain and installed Clamshell, a PHP implementation of OpenID that uses the file system rather than a database. I did notice that I had to change the directory permissions for writing the user files. It’s not that slick, but it’s functional.

I don’t see OpenID as something people will use for the likes of shopping sites, but for things like forum sites, blog logins and so forth, it’s a good solution.

Tags: Technology //