21–30 of 33 posts
I wrote a simple script to post an RSS feed that my university uses to twitter. (Actually, I hacked up Stammy's It currently has about 190 followers, but it used Basic Auth so it stopped working on Thursday. Rather than switching to OAuth, I'm tempted to just write a mechanize script to make posts using the web interface. Has anybody tried this approach?
Seems like this author just doesn't realize how painful migrating to OAuth is for a service provider. Of course xAuth isn't a real security improvement to HTTP Basic. But it forces everyone to support auth that isn't inherently broken. So once Twitter stops receiving many xAuth requests, they can just turn it off. The migration to OAuth 2 will be interesting though. All the existing clients will have the right kind o…
But your argument still doesn't explain why Twitter's supported service still uses xAuth. Or Twitterrific (and they have a significant market share). What is blocking them from migrating from Basic to non-xAuth OAuth?
I'll grant you that xAuth is a little convoluted. With that said, Twitter deserves credit for being unprecedentedly accommodating and transparent during the transition away from basic auth. It is obviously in their best interest not to break applications, but this hasn't stopped other social networks cough from yanking the rug from underneath scores of apps with little to no warning.
In that case you would use Out-of-band/PIN Code Authentication. See http://dev.twitter.com/pages/auth_overview.
For Pythonistas, my little Twitter API script uses tweepy.py. Thanks to http://jmillerinc.com/2010/05/31/twitter-from-the-command-li... for the steps involved. As an exercise, you could scrape the required PIN with beautifulSoup or similar code to eliminate one step.
xAuth seems like it'd work, but, as stated in the article, that involves me going through some hoops to get back to this level of security. woo.
OAuth is also a huge pain for those "I just want to write a little Twitter API script in 5 minutes" things. To the extent that I've thought about writing a couple lately, but chose not to because I didn't want to deal with OAuth (and they were scripts I'd want to work in the future). It seems like there should be some solution that lets me use basic auth for those little scripts. Maybe tell Twitter IP's from which I…
One pain point I've had since switching from Basic Auth has the lack of debugging via a terminal and curl. That was pretty useful. For Ruby-minded folks there's http://github.com/marcel/twurl which is effectively curl that uses OAuth - though it isn't the same. John Nunemaker wrote a tutorial on how to get get up and running with OAuth pretty quickly (though it is for the Ruby/Rails audience) http://railstips.org/blo…
OAuth is also a huge pain for those "I just want to write a little Twitter API script in 5 minutes" things. To the extent that I've thought about writing a couple lately, but chose not to because I didn't want to deal with OAuth (and they were scripts I'd want to work in the future). It seems like there should be some solution that lets me use basic auth for those little scripts. Maybe tell Twitter IP's from which I…
One pain point I've had since switching from Basic Auth has the lack of debugging via a terminal and curl. That was pretty useful. For Ruby-minded folks there's http://github.com/marcel/twurl which is effectively curl that uses OAuth - though it isn't the same. John Nunemaker wrote a tutorial on how to get get up and running with OAuth pretty quickly (though it is for the Ruby/Rails audience) http://railstips.org/blo…
https://gist.github.com/cfc477a0c5895e8bd1bd
Wrote this when I was drunk to prove a point.
I wrote a simple script to post an RSS feed that my university uses to twitter. (Actually, I hacked up Stammy's It currently has about 190 followers, but it used Basic Auth so it stopped working on Thursday. Rather than switching to OAuth, I'm tempted to just write a mechanize script to make posts using the web interface. Has anybody tried this approach?
Otherwise, no, I don't see it. I know that I'm less inclined to write a little hack to work with Twitter without basic auth.