As some of you may know, Twitter is fading out support for “basic authentication”. This basically means that app developers (like myself) can’t just send a user’s login information to Twitter’s server when we want to send a tweet or change a setting. Instead the application needs to be “authorized” by the user using a process called oAuth.

For Snapatar, this meant I needed to make a lot of changes. OAuth is far from trivial to implement, and I was lucky to find a library that handles most of the complicated stuff. With it, I was able to get oAuth working on snapatar.com, and beat the August 16 deadline.

Unfortunately, I messed up when I put the new version live. I forgot to update a setting in Twitter’s app registration system, causing the oAuth process to fail. But that has been fixed now, and you’re welcome to give the new authentication process a try. Currently, there’s absolutely no error handling, so you may run into an occasional poorly formatted error message if something failed. Most of the time however, it should just work.