Today, in and amongst meetings, phone calls, and emails, I managed to (with a little help from Adam Graffunder) set up my own OpenID identity running on my staff web account.
Why OpenID? Well, more and more web sites and services are accepting OpenID as an authentication method. Here’s a new article about it called How will OpenID change your site?
How did I do it?
I used phpMyID.
The process basically went like this:
I created a new directory on my web site (staff.washington.edu/oren) called myid. I uploaded the two php files from phpMyID into that directory (MyID.config.php and MyID.php) and followed the installation instructions in the README document.
When I then tried to log in, I got a ‘Missing expected authorization header’ error. No problem – the troubleshooting section of the document explains how to deal with that by using an included .htaccess file – on our server uncommenting the first option set in the file worked (if you’re confused, let me know and I’ll send you a copy of what worked for me).
I then added these two lines to the head section of my index.html file:
<link rel=”openid.server” href=”http://staff.washington.edu/oren/myid/MyID.config.php”>
<link rel=”openid.delegate” href=”http://staff.washington.edu/oren/myid/MyID.config.php”>
And then I was able to log into Basecamp by telling it to use the OpenID server at http://staff.washington.edu/oren/
Cool!
What would be even cooler? Well, phpMyID requires me to pick a new user name and password for its purposes. When I use the OpenID I then get prompted to enter that name and password, using HTTP Digest authentication. I’m sure somebody who knows their way around in this space could figure out how to make it use Shibboleth or Pubcookie and my UW NetID instead. But that’s for someone more sophisticated than I – like Mr. Gettes, or Nathan, or Zephyr 
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