One of the things I had completely forgotten about during my migration from WordPress to Octopress was OpenID. I had used one of the few OpenID plugins that tied into WordPress, and allowed you to use WordPress as an OpenID provider, giving me the ability to login to sites using my WordPress site.
This was great, and I’d completely forgotten about it because I rarely used it. That was until yesterday when somebody on the #Nagios IRC channel had asked a question, and then posted the same question to stackoverflow. I decided to answer the question over there, and remembered I had signed up for an account using OpenID, so I dutifully typed in my site URL, and was stumped because I wasn’t redirected.
This is where I did a little face-meets-desk action. I’d killed my OpenID account by killing off my WordPress site. I tried to think of a way around this, and did some quick searching, and stumbled upon a post by Darrin Mison, on the exact same topic. Darrin had left his WordPress site active over on Wordpress.com, but had migrated to his URL else where. Because of this, Darrin was able to use what is called a deligate, and tell anybody making a request to look elsewhere to authenticate.
This sparked a vague memory, and reminded me that when I first started tinkering with OpenID, I used a different site for the authentication, so a quick check, and I was able to login there. Now I just needed to edit my Octopress site to provide the delegate information.
I used myOpenID.com as my delegate, and they have a help article on how to handle using your own URL. Following what Darrin had done, I edited source/_includes/custom/head.html and added the lines that the were mentioned in the help doc. So now my head.html template looks like this:
<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://jonangliss.myopenid.com/" />
<link rel="openid2.local_id" href="http://jonangliss.myopenid.com" />
<link rel="openid2.provider" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />
<meta http-equiv="X-XRDS-Location" content="http://www.myopenid.com/xrds?username=jonangliss.myopenid.com" />
<!--Fonts from Google"s Web font directory at http://google.com/webfonts -->
<link href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=PT+Serif:regular,italic,bold,bolditalic" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<link href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=PT+Sans:regular,italic,bold,bolditalic" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
Pretty simple, and a rebuild of the blog, and my page now includes the delegate headers required to redirect OpenID requests.