Previously one can use the https://www.reddit.com/r/rprogramming/top.json API to access one subreddit's top posts. This API doesn't require any access token to fetch the data. However, this API may not work all the time. Reddit may block the API's request if it finds that you are using a script or some app which accesses the API now and then. For an app or script which needs to fetch the data routinely, what should we do?Reddit provides one method which can be used to fetch this kind of top posts data(no need to involve user data) and it requires one to access it with OAuth. In this post,...

Many websites now allow users to login to their websites with some third party accounts such as login with Facebook or login with Twitter. This is because Facebook and Twitter have many users and they also provide a good API for third parties to access the user data. This also eases the work of users since they no need to enter the same data again and again in each website. Now Amazon also releases its own login with Amazon plugin. Now third party websites can embed the login with Amazon button on their websites so that Amazon users can login to those websites without creating new account.The ...

Previously we wrote an article about getting access token for Facebook app--PHP to get access token for Facebook app. Today we will introduce how to get access token for Twitter app using PHP.Since now Twitter is also using OAuth 2.0 to allow some web apps to access some users information on behalf of one user. They provided some APIs for developers to easily get them integrated with their own websites. The first step to get all these done is how to get the access token, the access token seems like the password to one user's account on Twitter.First, we need to download the SDK, in this articl...

Last week we talked about giving away your passwords and how you should never do it.  When a website wants to use the services of another—such as Bitly posting to your Twitter stream—instead of asking you to share your password, they should use OAuth instead.OAuth is an authentication protocol that allows you to approve one application interacting with another on your behalf without giving away your password.This is a quick guide to illustrate, as simply as possible, how OAuth works.The ActorsThere are 3 main players in an OAuth transaction: the user, the consumer, and...

Facebook is currently on of the most important publishing and traffic generating sources for many websites. Manually Cross publishing content on your own site and Facebook seems like a lot of extra work.This post guides you through the creation of a Facebook application that can automatically post messages and other types of content on your Facebook wall.Getting startedBuilding a php script that automatically posts status updates on your wall requires the following steps:Download Facebook APIRegister a Facebook appGive the app rights to post on your wallBuild the post to Facebook scriptGet the...

After Twitter introduced mandatory authentication with OAuth, many of the current scripts for posting content to Twitter don’t work anymore.OAuth can be great for more advanced authentication, but for a simple post to twitter script, it seems like a little overkill.In this post you’ll learn how to create a simple script that uses a quick and dirty version of OAuth for posting new tweets to Twitter.How to create a simple scriptSimplified, Twitter OAuth involves sending both application tokens and user tokens back and forth between your site and Twitter.If you want to authenticate ...