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API Signature issue.. trying to get articles

July 12 2008 - 21:31 By thatmtnman

Dear developer rescue J

 

I am no coder but merely a ‘Padawan learner’ and writer in the world of blogging. I just joined Daylife and I have to say, I am just in love with the project!! I have a developer id, and I am kind of sort of getting the whole signature thing, but not really.  Which is a big problem. So before I ask my help question…..

 

….one quick comment if I may.

 

Your documentation while excellent for a coder type is, as so much of these kinds of things, coder friendly and definitely not friendly to non coders. You make some assumptions in your documentation about your audience’s knowledge level that isn’t really very helpful. I can point to some specifics if anyone would be interested. I think it would be helpful for you guys to consider some minor changes to what you have written. Ie…you say never include the id in the call, but later show an example where the id is included, but don’t clarify that with a real life example. One little example and I could have perhaps figured it out myself. Multiply by how ever many non coders are bugging you about ‘how to’ do ‘x’.

 

I want to be able to output titles, an abstract of an article, with a link to the actual article on one of my pages, and any accompanying images for country music artists, and related stories. How would I do that? Can you help me do that?

 

Thanks!!!!

 Frank Pecsy

Lover of Daylife already!  LOL!!

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July 12 2008 - 22:11 — vineet

Signature!

thatmtnman,

Thanks for the great feedback. Really helps to know "what doesn't work and how to make it better" ...

As for API signature, you have few main things to know:

  • You have API Credentials that are private to your account - an accesskey and a sharedsecret
  • You always provide the accesskey in every API call for us to identify who made the call
  • You never provide the sharedsecret in the API calls. It is a secret piece of infomration that is shared between you and us, and must never be exposed to the world
  • You always provide a signature in every API call. You create a string by concatenating your accesskey, shared secret and a core input specific to your API call. The md5 hash of this concatenated string is the signature for the API call.

What is your core input? That depends on what API call you are making. These are the possible values: