I’m a fan of the idea of OpenID which is why I use the OpenID plugin accept OpenID authentication for comments on this site and others that I run. I am under no illusions that it serves as an anti-spam measure which is why OpenID authenticated comments undergo all the same spam filtering that any other comment receives. One of the reasons that I use the OpenID plugin is that it allows me to use my blog as an OpenID identity server so I can use my own domain to authenticate me on other sites that accept OpenID – including (especially) Blogger. When I leave comments I like to be able to leave general comments that are authenticated by this site and have political comments authenticated by my political blog, Pursuit of Liberty (so that the comments point back to the most applicable site for the content of the comment). That worked for quite a while, but a few weeks ago I began getting an error when trying to use my OpenID’s on Blogger blogs.
I did a lot of searching but got no answers for the bug (I would leave the bug here so that others can find it, but Google changed the error code in that time to read “Your OpenID could not be verified”). Eventually I figured out that it was only happening when trying to leave comments authenticated through Pursuit of Liberty, but since the setup there is identical to the setup here that was not very helpful. Finally today I figured out the solution – I was authenticating through www.davidjmiller.org and pursuit-of-liberty.com – both are set up as www.{domain-name} and Google apparently decided to get strict on their authentication. When I leave comments from www.pursuit-of-liberty.com it worked fine. If anyone else finds this problem with Blogger and the OpenID plugin just remember to authenticate with or without the “www.” depending on how your site is set up (in other words make it match exactly).