Ssh Passwordlessly

David, I'd recommend augmenting your instructions to include a passphrase. An SSH private key without a passphrase is extremely dangerous. Should someone gain access to your private key, they can use it without any additional information. This makes it extremely easy for them to impersonate you.

There is a utility called ssh-agent that will prevent you from having to enter your passphrase every time you use your key pair. Github has an excellent guide for OS X users:

https://help.github.com/articles/working-with-ssh-key-passph...

Linux users will use ssh-agent as well, and most distros start it by default.

OpenSSH comes with the ssh-copy-id script to make things easier too.