Using Blogger’s OpenID with any URL

One of the cool things with our recent OpenID release is that you can use your own website, blog, or URL as your OpenID and still use Blogger as your OpenID provider. In the OpenID world, this is called “delegation,” and all it means is that you can use your own non-Blog*Spot URL as your OpenID identity, but still log in to OpenID sites with the Google Account you use on Blogger.

For example, if you have a blog at http://yourbloggerblog.blogspot.com/ but own the website http://www.myurl.com/, you can easily OpenID-enable http://www.myurl.com/. Just add this HTML to the <head> section of http://www.myurl.com/:

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://draft.blogger.com/openid-server.g" />
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://yourbloggerblog.blogspot.com" />

(Obviously, change “http://yourbloggerblog.blogspot.com” to your own blog’s URL.)

You’re all set. You can now use http://www.myurl.com/ as your OpenID identity on any site that accepts OpenID authentication, and you will be directed to Blogger to sign in.

New feature: Blogger as OpenID provider

As we hinted before, we’ve been working on making Blogger an OpenID provider. With our latest Blogger in Draft release, we’ve done just that. You can now use your blog’s URL as an OpenID URL on any website that accepts OpenID 1.1 authentication.

To enable OpenID for your blogs, just edit your profile on draft.blogger.com and enable the checkbox which says Enable OpenID for Blogs and you are all set!

After checking this box, you can use the URL of any of the blogs you are an admin of as an OpenID identity. When you use it to log in to another site, you will be taken back to Blogger where you can confirm that Blogger can tell the site that you own the domain.

You can find more information about OpenID and how it works at OpenID.net.

We hope you’ll try out using your blog as your OpenID identity around the web. Let us know how it goes in the comments! If you’re looking for things to do, take a look at MyOpenID’s OpenID Site Directory for OpenID-enabled sites.

Since this feature is still in draft, there are a few caveats:
  1. We currently do not support OpenID for blogs that aren’t hosted on Blog*Spot or a custom domain, such as FTP blogs. However, the OpenID web site has a help page that explains how to workaround this limitation by delegating your FTP blog to a Blogger-hosted blog.
  2. If you say “Yes, Always” to trust an OpenID site forever, you cannot now delete that trust. We will add this feature soon.
Update, 1/29: We have a quick HOWTO post for delegating to Blogger as your OpenID provider.