I love having my own domain name

March 16, 2012

About half an hour ago, I decided I was unhappy with MyOpenID as my OpenID provider. They have been down quite a lot of late (or so it seems to me), and this evening I finally had enough.

I’m really glad that I decided to use OpenID delegation from my own domain name. It means that I can give the same URL as my OpenID when I log in to websites, no matter which provider I’m using. The website I’m logging into doesn’t even care whether I’ve changed providers in the meantime (because that’s none of its business)!

What’s OpenID, I hear you ask? Here’s a quick summary.

You can do the same sort of thing with your email provider, or with your blog or website hosting, as long as you own the domain name, and tell those services to use it (and also tell your domain registrar to point to those services).

What’s that? The gentleman up the back? How could you get one of these domain name thingies? Well, you need to register it, and there’s typically some sort of annual fee. A good registrar is not easy to find (I’ve never used one myself), but I’m told Hover is very good.

Happy Internetsing, until next time!