11–20 of 52 posts
I'm not very familiar with Mozilla's Persona. Been meaning to try it but I've got to find the time and a suitable project.
This is a quite arrogant post. I do not make APIs but I can understand some needs of the API providers. First of all you are being arrogant because you if you just want an URL and nothing more means that for you every API must be free and this is totally bullshit. Also giving you a URL and nothing more gives me no control on what you do. You could harm my service by doing too many request or god knows what and I coul…
I could harm your service by making too many API-key signed, OAuth-signed requests too. I could harm your service by hitting your website a lot too. We have ways of dealing with people who intentionally or unintentionally launch the equivalent of denial of service attacks: you block their IPs and move on. There's no need to have a special magical way of doing it with an API.
The point is the whole concept of an API should be unnecessary. We have a way of saying where data is: URLs. We have a way of specifying what format the client wants it in: content negotiation (Accept headers). We have a way of retrieving that data: HTTP GET. There's a reason why BugMeNot exists for websites. API keys are basically pointless registration pages for access to the same data that is being published on the web.
As for the code samples: if there's little more needed than "here's the URL of our data", I don't need a code sample. I only need a code sample when it's been made ridiculously over-complicated.
(My favourite API recently: clockworksms.com - all of the other SMS providers I've looked at want me to talk to some salesman and/or read complicated docs. Clockwork just let me send an HTTPS POST message. They have an API key, sure, but they required only an email address to get it. And I can pay for credits with PayPal. Ridiculously simple. I like.)
As for arrogancy? Guilty as charged. I'll say in my defence that it's more that the data I wanted to retrieve from the service in question (which I won't name) was exceptionally simple, had no commercial value in itself, but would send referrals to the site that they could monetise (and there's no affiliate scheme, I wasn't gonna profit off this). There literally is no business reason to lock that kind of API down. It's just cargo-cult API design: everyone else has API keys, they must have a reason, so I better have that too.
This is a quite arrogant post. I do not make APIs but I can understand some needs of the API providers. First of all you are being arrogant because you if you just want an URL and nothing more means that for you every API must be free and this is totally bullshit. Also giving you a URL and nothing more gives me no control on what you do. You could harm my service by doing too many request or god knows what and I coul…
I just noticed the "Sign in" link on the top left. Clicking that opens up a windows popup with Mozilla's new Persona login feature. I didn't enter my email address but instead closed the popup. Yet the site refreshed and shows: "You are signed in as ". Is this normal behavior? I'm not very familiar with Mozilla's Persona. Been meaning to try it but I've got to find the time and a suitable project.
It's a case of building my site from scratch, and I wanted a super-light-weight authentication system. So I picked Persona. (Incidentally, I picked it because unlike Twitter or Facebook or whatever, I didn't need any API keys to get started.) There are a few bugs with my implementation. But as it's just to authenticate me to access the admin panel, it's no biggie.
This is a quite arrogant post. I do not make APIs but I can understand some needs of the API providers. First of all you are being arrogant because you if you just want an URL and nothing more means that for you every API must be free and this is totally bullshit. Also giving you a URL and nothing more gives me no control on what you do. You could harm my service by doing too many request or god knows what and I coul…
Counterpoint - http://api.dribbble.com
Just the other day I went to use the good old fashioned twitter API to find that it had been deprecated in favor of a new one that requires that I do everything differently in order to get the same results. Really irked me. I can empathize with this guy.
Yeah. I wanted to read some tweets, but apparently I now need a stupid API token and have to do OAuth! What happened to the good old days of session-less read only-mode APIs?! :(
This is a quite arrogant post. I do not make APIs but I can understand some needs of the API providers. First of all you are being arrogant because you if you just want an URL and nothing more means that for you every API must be free and this is totally bullshit. Also giving you a URL and nothing more gives me no control on what you do. You could harm my service by doing too many request or god knows what and I coul…
There's a few things I'll push back on: I could harm your service by making too many API-key signed, OAuth-signed requests too. I could harm your service by hitting your website a lot too. We have ways of dealing with people who intentionally or unintentionally launch the equivalent of denial of service attacks: you block their IPs and move on. There's no need to have a special magical way of doing it with an API. Th…
This is a quite arrogant post. I do not make APIs but I can understand some needs of the API providers. First of all you are being arrogant because you if you just want an URL and nothing more means that for you every API must be free and this is totally bullshit. Also giving you a URL and nothing more gives me no control on what you do. You could harm my service by doing too many request or god knows what and I coul…
There's a few things I'll push back on: I could harm your service by making too many API-key signed, OAuth-signed requests too. I could harm your service by hitting your website a lot too. We have ways of dealing with people who intentionally or unintentionally launch the equivalent of denial of service attacks: you block their IPs and move on. There's no need to have a special magical way of doing it with an API. Th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nowhere in the post he writes that the APIs must be free. Maybe he just wants to pay with money instead of time and attention.
That would imply the need for an API key though, and he mentions that he doesn't want those.