My own-branded OpenID

As Marshall Kirkpatrick mentioned earlier this month on ReadWriteWeb, myOpenID now allow you to create OpenID accounts through your own domain.

I’ve already covered this briefly as an aside however as I regularly use OpenIDs for both work (Basecamp) and pleasure (ClaimID) I decided to give it a go. My current OpenID provided by ClaimID, who were at the forefront of implementing OpenIDs, is not very aesthetically pleasing, and the premise of myOpenIDs new feature is to allow me to have my own .scottmallinson.com OpenID.

So lets get started…

Navigating to the myOpenID homepage, I am greeted with the following text:

Get myOpenID for your domain

Do you own a domain? With myOpenID For Domains, you can issue OpenIDs to your employees, family, or organization with your own URL. It’s easy to set up and manage your users. Start now!

Great, that’s made it easy for me. So clicking on the Start now! link plunges me right into setting up OpenID for my domain name. I enter my domain name, scottmallinson.com (note: without the www.) and select the second radio button:

http://<username>.scottmallinson.com/

Then click the ‘Sign In or Sign Up’ button. The next step prompts you to either sign in or sign up. As I don’t already have an account with myOpenID I selected to sign up for an account.

Follow the sign up process, entering your username (note: this will not be used for your domain OpenID), password, email address and agreeing to the fine print. Click the ‘Sign Up’ button.

You should now shortly receive an email to the address you provided which will contain a confirmation link to activate your account. From there you should be taken to a ‘Manage Domain: Your Domain Name’ webpage, where you will be asked to configure the DNS for your domain name by adding a CNAME entry.

Name: *.scottmallinson.com
Type: CNAME
Value: www.myopenid.com

This is probably the most technical part of the OpenID implementation of the whole setup, and as I had already performed a similar operation setting up FeedBurner MyBrand, it was relatively straight-forward. Clicking the ‘Continue to Domain Status’ button presents you with a further webpage to manage your domain.

Your domain is almost ready. To finish setting it up:
» Get verified! Configure your domain verification settings.
» Add some user accounts to your domain.

The ‘Get verified! Configure your domain verification settings’ link allows you to verify your domain by either ‘adding a special DNS record’, a randomly generated CNAME record value, or by ‘putting a Web page with a code in it on your site’. I prefer to keep my server folder structure as clean and uncomplicated as possible, so I opted to adding a special DNS record. This is the same process as performed earlier when I added the *.scottmallinson.com CNAME entry. With that done, all that remains is to add accounts.

Simply enter the user’s email address and username, and click the ‘Add Accounts’ button and you’re done. You may notice that the ‘alert’;

Your domain is almost ready. To finish setting it up: » Get verified! Configure your domain verification settings.

Remains even after you have setup the verification, this could be due to if you chose to add a DNS setting as a means of verification. The DNS servers can take a while to propagate, and so the alert may remain until the DNS servers are updated.

So that’s adding your own OpenID to your own domain name using myOpenID in a nutshell. You should be able to start using it straight-away.