Over on Change.org, there is a discussion about Adding OpenID support to Change.org. What’s good for the gander is good for the goose, so I thought I should investigate adding OpenID to Orient Lodge.

For those of you who aren’t acquainted with OpenID, it is “an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity.” The first thing that is needed for such a framework is a way of authenticating identity. So, instead of having to keep track of passwords for lots of different systems, using OpenID, you can have one password, authenticated at a specific place, which is used to sign in at many sites.

Currently, if you have userids at LiveJournal, Wordpress, Vox, AOL, you have an easy to use OpenID userid already. If you use Yahoo!, you can indirectly use idproxy.net. You can also add code to your own site so that it will point to one of these as the authentication service. Currently, Orient Lodge is pointing to my Yahoo! id via idproxy.net.

All of this is well and good, if you can log into other sites using OpenID. Slowly, more and more sites are supporting OpenID, and now (at least until something breaks), you can log into Orient Lodge using OpenID. Read the details below the fold.