The best reason to start a blog: OpenID

So I wanted to create an account on Stackoverflow.com -- a new website, created by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolski to aggregate the combined knowledge of the web about programming. They use OpenID for people to register.

OpenID is a very nice idea, that lets you create an id on a website (an 'OpenID provider', such as blogger.com), and then use that ID to log in to all sorts of other places. It's nice for users, because you can re-use your credentials instead of having to create yet another username/password everywhere you go, and it is even nicer for website creators, because they don't have to go through the hassle of maintaining a username/password database, and create features that let users create, reset or remove their accounts.

In this case, Stackoverflow.com uses OpenID for identification, but is not an OpenID provider itself -- it is very helpfull in pointing you to a number of them. I chose blogger.com, mainly because the OpenID it results in seemed easiest to remember (the OpenID 'username' is actually a URL that combines a personally chosen part (jhdevos, in my case), and information about which OpenID provider registered the id (in this case, blogger.com).

Anyway, I can now log onto stackoverflow.com, and I ended up with a blog to boot. Let's see whether this will be my last post :-)