Barbie

A project I started back last year is Maisha, a command line client to interface to social micro-blogging networks, such as Twitter. On 31st August this year, Twitter depreciated the Basic Authention method of allowing applications to login users with a simple username and password combination. In its place they now use OAuth. (See also the blog post by Marc Mims - author of Net-Twitter).

On the face of it, OAuth seemed a bit confusing, and even the documentation is devoid of decent diagrams to explain it properly. Once I did get it, it was surprising to discover just how easy the concept and implementation is. For the most part Marc Mims has implemented all the necessary work within Net-Twitter, so Maisha only needed to add the code to provide the right URL for authorisation, and allow the user to enter the PIN# that then allows the application to use the Twitter API.

The big advantage to OAuth is that you don't need to save your password in plain text for an application. Once you enter the authorisation PIN#, the token is then saved, and reused each time you start up Maisha to access your Twitter feed.

As Identi.ca also implements an Open Source version of Twitter, they have also implemented OAuth in their interface. However, there is a slight modification to Net::Twitter needed, so I will wait for Marc to implement that before releasing the next version of Maisha.

So if you have been using Maisha and have been frustrated that you can no longer access Twitter, you now only need to upgrade to App-Maisha-0.14 and all should work again (once you've entered the PIN# of course).

If you are using Maisha, and have any feedback or wishlist suggestions please let me know.