OAuth
We have been pushing out small, incremental features out over the past month and we have another one today. Embedly Pro users can now sign their requests using Two-legged OAuth. We have a few people worried about the safety of their keys and how they could protect them. Instead of creating yet another signing process that a developer has to learn we decided to go with a standard that has great documentation and a number of existing libraries.
OAuth generally deals with the shuffle of authenticating a user without making the user give up their password. Twitter, Facebook and Google have all implemented OAuth for developers to make requests on behalf of a user. In Embedly's case there is no user which makes the process simpler. To get started you can read the following:
These documents are generally meant for Three-legged OAuth which is the shuffle mentioned above. To use Two-legged OAuth all a developer needs to do is set the Access Token and Secret to an empty string (""). Here is an example using the python-oauth2 library.
We are going to be updating our libraries over the next few weeks to use OAuth, but in the meantime feel free to take her for a test drive. Pro users head to your dashboard and select "Use OAuth".
