I opted to join the OpenId crowd.  Do I really have any use for OpenId?  No, not really.  Now that I have it, I’ll see where I can use it and start trying to utilize it.

Here’s the link to my OpenId page, for your perusal:

http://openid.programmersparadox.com/mmzyk

I signed up with myOpenId, but that might not be obvious from the URL above because I opted to use their service and make my domain my OpenId.

I think it’s cool that my domain can be my OpenId.  That was really the thing that made me decide to try it out.  I didn’t want to have yet another login with another provider, but being able to tie a portable identity to my own domain?  Now that was worth trying.

I’m happy now that I figured it out, but it is much more difficult than it should be.

First, I had to modify my DNS records to get the openid sub-domain setup on programmersparadox.  I don’t have access to the DNS records for this site, but my awesome hosting provider, Laughing Squid, set that up for me and set it up quickly, less than half a day after I requested it be done.

So far so good, but then came the pain.  To set up OpenId for programmersparadox, I had to first sign up on myOpenId.  Then I associated my domain with my account.  That’s easy eough.  Then I created the first OpenId account under programmersparadox, which is, naturally, my own.

Guess what?  It’s a completely separate account from the original I set up with myOpenId.  I now had to create an account with myOpenId under the programmersparadox domain.  Creating the account isn’t hard, although it took me a good while to finally decipher what the login name was for the new account, since the setup process doesn’t make it clear.

Once that was figured out, all I wanted to do was replicate the information from my original myOpenId account to the new OpenId account associated with programmersparadox.  I never found a way to do that automatically.  I ended up re-entering and copying and pasting the information by hand.

Come on myOpenId.  You’ve got a good thing going, now you just need to make it easier to use.  If I, as a technology guy, am having this much trouble, I can’t imagine what the luddite is going to think when I’m trying to convince them to sign up for this.