The hunt was on to set up an OpenID for myself. Afraid of losing my nerd badge I immediately, repeatedly clicked the instructions to run your own server. I didn't really have problems with those until I saw the feature vs. implementation matrix and realized maintaining an OpenID server was an ongoing task of medium effort and low interest.

Apparently plenty of sites are more than happy to give you an OpenID for free. Since it was free my main concern was vanity. I didn't want me.somerandomsite.com. Promoting this blog site was goal #1 so having an id of blogs.foognostic.net was critical. Making that hard was a non-starter.

I surfed through the options and noticed ClaimID. I remember thinking it sounded a little bit like a digital land grab, sort of a squatter's rights deal. Kind of like the flag of the U.S.A. on the moon.

Happily though ClaimID seemed kind of comfortable.

Pros:

• Clear, useful, easy to find documentation
• Easy to get an OpenID at my domain
• Free
• Built and supported by technical types, not excessive biz folks.
• Tips on managing digital identities

Cons / questions

• Why am I supposed to add links to claimid? Why compete with reddit or del.icio.us?
• For Technorati: why can't I sign in with OpenID‽‽ ¿ƃuıssıɯ ı ɯɐ ʇɐɥʍ (thx fliptitle)

Bottom line is that I was able to copy HTML from ClaimID into WordPress and then log into StackOverflow pretty easily. And now I have this OpenID solution in need of login problems. Maybe that will happen more frequently in the future. As a web app developer, I wouldn't mind someone else managing the login credentials.