Yesterday, I pointed to a roundup of 10 Web 2.0 APIs. I also stated that I wanted to see more of OpenID. Well, Simon must have read my mind because I’m pretty sure he is not reading my blog. Today, he has a step by step guide on how to turn your homepage into an OpenID. If you have control of a URI, you can make it your OpenID so it is portable between providers.

For example, you could start using LiveJournal. If, in the future, you wanted to use another provider, you simply set up an account on the new provider and change the mapping on your index page. This means you do not need to change your OpenID URI on all of the sites that you use OpenID to authenticate on. In other words, as long as you have control of your domain, you can use it as your OpenID no matter who your actual provider is.

If you want to cut the third party provider out of the equation, you can run your own OpenID server. phpMyID is quite easy to set up (less than 5 minutes) so long as you can run PHP scripts on your server. This will allow you to create your own OpenID without opening an account somewhere else (like Livejournal).

Update: If you are scratching your head and wondering how this OpenID stuff really works, check out this screencast.