I recently integrated OpenId into a project that I am working on with my wife, WebQuest Builder in order to avoid the extra considerations related to storing user password.

Originally I had planned on using RPXNow in order to do this. But after reading about how realms worked, specifically that Google gives a different identifier for each realm, I decided against this option. Because while RPXNow does have support  for custom realms, webquestbuilder.com instead of webquestbuilder.rpxnow.com, it would cost $99/month in order to get this. And after my wife made a comment that it seemed almost like someone phishing for her account do to the webquestbuilder.rxpnow.com in Googles OpenId form.

The other option that I had been considering had been DotNetOpenAuth which was very simple to integrate. It took about an hour to get it running in my development environment. I only had one issue when I pushed it live, which I will go into in a future post. For the OpenId selector I used Jarrett Vance’s Id selector for the Sign In.

After showing it to a few people I ended up making a few tweaks to the Id Selector. The first  chance that I made was to change it so that the OpenId checkbox did not show up, because a couple of the people I showed it to tried entering in their gmail address instead of Google’s OpenId Url. The other change I did was order them by which providers I thought they were most likely to be using, I hope the Microsoft gets their OpenId provider going soon so that I can integrate hotmail/live accounts into this.