See I’ve been using http://meme-rocket.com as my OpenID. By ensuring that my template had appropriate link elements, I was able to delegate actual OpenID authentication to JanRain’s myopenid.com provider. The idea was that rather than using my JanRain-issued OpenID everywhere, I’d use http://meme-rocket.com and then I’d be free to change providers at a later date if needed.

Since moving to wordpress.com I’ve found no way to add the necessary links to the template. Only answer I got on the support forum was:

Sorry, I don’t think you’re in the right place…

I get that a lot.

If I can’t get the folks at wordpress.com support to solve this it’ll mean I won’t be able to use my blog URL as my OpenID any more. That will be a little sad. Also It’ll entail groveling around to a bunch of sites and updating profiles. Worst case I may have to temporarily redirect my domain back to my (self-hosted) blog in order to authenticate (under my old OpenID) in order to change to a new one

update 15:19: well while it’s true that there is no way to insert those links, since wordpress.com is an OpenID provider I don’t strictly need the links in order for my blog URL to serve as my OpenID. I just verified that I am able to enter http://meme-rocket.com into relying party sites and that they are able to authenticate me. Minor issue that remains is that since I’m redirecting (DNS) meme-rocket.com to memerocket.com I actually get authenticated under the latter domain. So if I really want my accounts back I’ll have to temporarily un-redirect that domain and then log in to all the affected accounts and change them to use memerocket.com.

The Thought Propulsion™ corporate site is up and running. For the technically inclined, here are some interesting facts:

• hosted on Amazon EC2
• using the extremely slick EC2 On Rails Ubuntu/Ruby on Rails virtual appliance
• there’s a tasty microformatted hcard on the contact page (check it out with Operator)
• OpenID login (foreshadowing)

And of course a nice gray and orange theme just in time for Halloween.

If you use your WordPress blog as an OpenID (as I do) via a link rel=’openid.delegate’ tag (that delegates to an external OpenID service) then you may be locked out of your accounts after upgrading to WordPress 2.3.x.

WordPress 2.3 introduced a new feature called URL canonicalization that turns requests to foo.com into www.foo.com. The justification is that it helps normalize statistics gathering in some cases (though in my experience, Google Analytics needed no such help).

But what happens if you were using an OpenID like foo.com on a (OpenID ‘consumer’) site like pibb.com is that after the WP 2.3.2 upgrade you actually end up authenticating the id www.foo.com (not foo.com). So you can never get back into your foo.com account at pibb.com. Got that?

Update 4:49pm:

My initial solution was this nifty one-line disable canonical redirects plugin from Mark Jaquith. Simply drop that in your WP plugins and enable it and you’ll no longer suffer URL canonicalization. But a simpler approach was to simply set the blog URL to http://meme-rocket.com in general options. Now I’m redirecting www.meme-rocket.com to meme-rocket.com and all’s well.