OpenID is a nice way to reduce number of passwords and logins you have to remember when using various web services. At least it is designed to be ;-)
Anyway — from now on you configure any of the pages within your Wiki as your identifier when logging into an OpenID-enabled service. Wikidot.com does not (yet) offer OpenID server capabilities but you can easily configure a delegation from Wikidot to any of the OpenID identity providers, e.g. MyOpenID, LiveJournal, GetOpenID.com. So it works like this:
- I have a wiki at http://michal.wikidot.com and an OpenID account at http://myopenid.com (to be exact: http://michal.frackowiak.myopenid.com).
- Since Wikidot does not offer a true OpenID server but I want to use michal.wikidot.com as my public URL identifier, I configure a delegation (at Site Manager » OpenID) to michal.frackowiak.myopenid.com
- anytime I am using an OpenID-enabled service I log in as michal.wikidot.com, but the service forwards me to MyOpenID to authorize.
- this way I am using a cool Wiki URL instead of the generic one from MyOpenID ;-)
Read more at http://openid.net. Some people say that 2007 will be the year of OpenID. There are not that many OpenID-enabled services but it certainly becomes more and more trendy to use it.
Using an OpenID system you can:
- start an account at Zooomr (http://beta.zooomr.com)
- leave comments at LiveJournal (http://livejournal.com)
- log in into WikiTravel (http://www.wikitravel.com)
- and perhaps many more services (some listed here)
Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalfrackowiak.com