1: Yes, probably the best solution, but it still amounts to my asking you to do extra work to cope with my issues, and I'm well aware that it's unreasonable for me to expect everyone to bother.
2: Nope, it was invented/developed by LJ/6A (at least partly because nobody trusted Microsoft's version, IIRC), and is, as I recall, handled by an entity that has a bunch of different blog-hosting and other Web2.0 companies as members.
3: OpenID is, unfortunately, rather confusing ... but what it does, AFAICT, is send the login request to the site you claim to be a member of, and that site (which I think you already have to be logged into) asks you for permission to verify your credentials to the foreign site, and the foreign site never sees a password.
That is, you attempt an OpenID login at IJ, IJ contacts LJ, LJ asks if it's okay to tell IJ you're you, LJ tells IJ "yeah, he's logged in here and is the one who told you he was him", IJ gives you a you're-logged-in cookie or whatever it is that it does to create a login session.
(With luck, someone who understands OpenID better than I do will be reading this ...)
Er ... on the IJ comment page, I see radio buttons for 'Anonymous', 'OpenID', and 'LiveJournal user'. The third one is a bug -- they forgot to change that text to say "InsaneJournal user" when IJ was set up. Whoops.
Was that the one you'd picked?
When I selected 'OpenID', two boxes popped up, for 'Identity URL', where I entered 'dglenn.livejournal.com', and a 'Log in?' checkbox (which logs you into IJ under your OpenID identity, efectively creating an IJ account of a special OpenID type, IIRC, which you can later go and associate an icon with, and that IJ users can friend to allow
The next page that opened in my browser was http://www.livejournal.com/openid/approve.bml (with a bunch of arguments after it). That page says, "Another site on the web wants to validate your LiveJournal identity. No information will be shared with them that isn't already public in your profile, only that you're who you've already told them you are (if you told them). The address wanting permission is: http://www.insanejournal.com. Do you want to pass your identity to them?" and it has yes-once, yes-always, and 'no' buttons. So I never had to type my LJ password on a page that didn't have an LJ URL.
Not Microsoft, Six Apart
2: Nope, it was invented/developed by LJ/6A (at least partly because nobody trusted Microsoft's version, IIRC), and is, as I recall, handled by an entity that has a bunch of different blog-hosting and other Web2.0 companies as members.
3: OpenID is, unfortunately, rather confusing ... but what it does, AFAICT, is send the login request to the site you claim to be a member of, and that site (which I think you already have to be logged into) asks you for permission to verify your credentials to the foreign site, and the foreign site never sees a password.
That is, you attempt an OpenID login at IJ, IJ contacts LJ, LJ asks if it's okay to tell IJ you're you, LJ tells IJ "yeah, he's logged in here and is the one who told you he was him", IJ gives you a you're-logged-in cookie or whatever it is that it does to create a login session.
(With luck, someone who understands OpenID better than I do will be reading this ...)
Re: Not Microsoft, Six Apart
Re: Not Microsoft, Six Apart
Re: Not Microsoft, Six Apart
Was that the one you'd picked?
When I selected 'OpenID', two boxes popped up, for 'Identity URL', where I entered 'dglenn.livejournal.com', and a 'Log in?' checkbox (which logs you into IJ under your OpenID identity, efectively creating an IJ account of a special OpenID type, IIRC, which you can later go and associate an icon with, and that IJ users can friend to allow
The next page that opened in my browser was http://www.livejournal.com/openid/approve.bml (with a bunch of arguments after it). That page says, "Another site on the web wants to validate your LiveJournal identity. No information will be shared with them that isn't already public in your profile, only that you're who you've already told them you are (if you told them). The address wanting permission is: http://www.insanejournal.com. Do you want to pass your identity to them?" and it has yes-once, yes-always, and 'no' buttons. So I never had to type my LJ password on a page that didn't have an LJ URL.
Re: Not Microsoft, Six Apart
Yep. I assumed it was some sort of interoperability with LJ thing, not a bug.